Shelley Read

A Novel

Go As a River

Victoria Justice

I've come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.

The stranger's eyes were as dark and shiny as a raven's wing. And kind - that is what I remember most about those eyes from the first glimpse until the final gaze - a gentleness that seemed to fountain from his center and spill out like an overflowing well.

Love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.

Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moment of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.

Sometimes a woman splits in two. Sometimes a woman is a public self who sits rigid on a bench with proper dignity and acceptance as someone she deeply loves walks away, while simultaneously her private self is shrieking and chasing and grasping and tackling and begging that love to stay.

I had tried, as Wil taught me, to go as a river, but it had taken me a long while to understand what that meant. Flowing forward against obstacle was not my whole story. For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else.

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