At the railing
I came to the bridge with a notebook and a sentence already prepared. The river is the memory of the city. I thought it sounded good. Below the railing, a plastic bag turned in a slow circle beside a branch.
'I am also water,' said the river.
I looked around. A bicycle rattled over the bridge. Nobody else appeared surprised.
'I was trying to honour you,' I said.
'Then notice something you did not bring with you.'
I closed the notebook. Under the bridge, the bank disappeared behind a wall. A pipe entered the water. I could not tell what came through it, or whether anything did. For once, I wrote down a question instead of an answer.
The question downstream
'Are you angry with us?' I asked.
'Who is us?' said the river. 'The person who crosses me to work? The person who decides where the drain goes? The person who cannot afford to live farther from my bank? You put many different people inside a very small word.'
I had hoped for a simpler conversation. A warning, perhaps. Something I could place beneath a picture and send to everyone I knew.
'Would you like us to clean the bank?'
'Ask the people who already do. Ask what keeps arriving after they leave. And do not climb down there because you want your photograph to look useful.'
I stepped back from the railing. The bag loosened from the branch and moved out of sight. Its disappearance did not feel like an ending.
What I carried home
'I cannot repair a whole river,' I said.
'You came to write a whole river,' it replied.
We were quiet for a while. Or I was quiet, and the water continued doing what water does around the bridge supports. I noticed how much my idea of listening had depended on hearing something meant for me.
At home, I crossed out my opening sentence. I drew the bridge, the wall and the pipe. Beneath them I wrote what I knew, which was very little, and what I needed to find out.
The next morning I returned without a speech. The river did not speak. This time, I did not take that as permission to speak for it.
