Regret is a powerful thing...
There was really only one memory that still held any detail in his mind, as he got further and further on in years. He had taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 people across the river in his time as the boatman. He had pulled his little raft back and forth across the river along the rope he had tied when he was still young, taking men, women and children; young people and old people, the strong and the feeble, and the kind and the cruel for so many years, but only one did he really remember. When all things slipped away to the dusty annals of time, she remained. Always was she clear and focused in his mind’s eye.
He had been a mere 23 years old when he bore her across the river. From when he first saw her walking to his pier, heading from the old and broken town, he was entranced by her. She was young and beautiful and full of life. Her frame was juxtaposed against the dilapidated ruins behind her. So much was in disrepair, and yet, she was not. Every hair was in place, and every piece of nature around her seemed to bend to her will, to lean to just the perfect placement to accentuate her beauty. It was as if all things served her – this… goddess.
Smiling, she approached him and climbed onto his boat. He nodded and began to move his modest raft out across the water. She leaned against the bench that ran down the middle, but didn’t quite sit. She looked at him and smiled. He nodded at her, nervous and almost unable to speak.
“Beautiful day,” she said to him.
He merely nodded, at first, but then steeled himself with all he had. “Yes, it is quite beautiful,” he brought himself to say, never taking his eyes away from hers, not even to glance at the world around him. Yes, it was beautiful, for the goddess before him and no other reason. In his head, the scenarios played out in a thousand ways all at once as he contemplated what to say to her. From the corner of his eye he could see the shore approaching and half-contemplated pulling the knife from the sheath in his boot and cutting the rope so that his little ship would drift down the river, locking their paths together, at least for a time. Anything to prevent the departure of this goddess. But no, that would not do. Nor would any words he could utter. He hadn’t the poetry in his tongue to charm this beauty, regardless of the way she stared smiling at him – almost waiting for something. She’s but waiting for the shore, he told himself.
And wait no more did she. The shore came and she went, looking back with a final sad smile. He said nothing. A thousand words rushed to his lips, one at the forefront: the king at the front of the charge - but they stopped at the impenetrable barrier of his teeth and fell back. Nothing. And she was gone, as was all beauty from his desolate world.
I’ll remember her beauty ‘til eternity come, he thought.
Three score years had fallen away from him, and his memory of her had merely grown while all else faded. So many times he prayed to any god he could imagine to turn back time, to give him a second chance, because he knew he would never fail again. He knew that he would speak his mind, that he would not let her go so easily. But nothing seemed to work. And as he grew closer to death, old and frail and very much alone, he still thought back to those few moments, and he felt surely and completely that all the world and all of fate and every god and deity had worked to bring this beauty to him, and he had failed them with his cowardice.
When he knew that he had little time left in his long and empty life, he sat alone and thought and pondered on what had transpired that day, and even more so on what had not. He thought of ways that it could have gone differently.
When he realized that he would soon die an empty death he began to think of some way to bring meaning to his life. He could think of nothing that did not involve changing the events of that day.
It must be possible, he thought. Time was a river, and if one fought hard enough and long enough, one could travel upstream in even the swiftest moving river. He gathered all the hope, conviction and courage he could muster and he dedicated every store of energy in every fiber of his body, pulling it all together and bending it all towards a single task. He focused on each perfect detail he could imagine. Her flowing hair, just a touch of curl to it, red in the sunlight. Her smooth and perfect lips, turned up at the sides in a hopeful smile. Her form held by a flowing and simple dress. Her eyes, green and glimmering and deeper than the river he’d spent his life on. He pictured all the countless seconds of emptiness that lay between the present and the immutable past. He pictured each undoing itself and rolling back moment by moment – picking up speed as it raced back to the nexus he sought.
His body was wound tightly, his eyes unfocused. His skin and his skull shook as he tensed his muscles further and further. The depth of his focus moved back and forth across the mess of his humble little home. His head ached and his fists clenched. His nails dug deeply into his old and withered skin. Every muscle from the back of his neck on up to the front of his skull had pulled tighter and tighter. He felt as if his brain had caught fire and become some terrible raging inferno locked within his skull. A trickle of blood dribbled down from his nostril. He opened his mouth and gasped, half-realizing that he’d held his breath for several minutes. Heaving, he reactively reached his hand up to his nose as more blood rushed down, pouring and coating his hands in a thick and viscous red.
She was beautiful and pristine in his mind, but slowly her image was overtaken by another conjured by his aching consciousness. He could nearly see himself, old and pathetic and pouring blood, with a shocked look of horror on his face.
No.
He knew he had to keep going. Time was a river, he thought, one must only paddle hard enough.
He pushed harder and harder, past his own tolerance for pain, past his final hopes and further and further into the realm of desperation. Blood collected in a pool below his hand, mixing with the dust and dirt of his floor to create little brown and red puddles and bubbles of his very essence. He pulled her image back, her brilliant smile and hair and eyes and everything, every detail, he pictured her getting up to step off the raft, and he yelled, almost too loudly, almost too awkwardly, “Wait.”
But she did not. No sound came from his lips, not then, and now, not ever again. He slides off the edge of his little bed, where he half sat, half stood leaning against it. He lands on his knees, splashing blood up onto his trousers, dropping his hands to the floor. The world spins and reels and he falls forward. Time slows and the floor advances. Blood flings up to the side creating beautiful patterns in the air around him and finally his face hits the dirt and he lays flat, eyes unfocused, looking past the bases of the meager furnishings of his home.
Time is a river, he thinks, Time is a river, and if one has the time and the energy and not so far to travel, perhaps, one can swim upstream. But not now, not with so far to go. Time is a river, and the right word at the right place can divert the greatest rivers of the greatest lives. One can urge it into a joining with the river of another. One doesn’t have to float down to the end alone. One word, in the right place – wait – is enough to change everything. But not now, not with the right moment far past the horizon behind me. No – I’ve ridden the river of time, and come to its end. I’ve come alone. Time is a river and at the end are the great falls, where all, whether high or low, weak or strong, brave or cowardly fall. Perhaps she’ll be waiting there, and when I lay myself down to find the peace of eternity, I won’t have to be alone anymore. Perhaps. Perhaps though, there is another river and another chance when it’s all over.
He doesn’t know. He knows only what should have been and what is, but not what will be. As he lies, staring out through the little window at the sun in the sky, he’s reminded of the way it reflected off her hair. How it lit up like fire, like passion. He remembers every detail. But he won’t have to remember much longer. He swore he’d remember her beauty ‘til eternity come, and it had come for him, at last. He would soon take that final plunge, as the river of his life, of time, expired, and perhaps, he could finally forget. For him, that was as good a fate as any.