The River Takes Everything

The years don’t ask for permission— they arrive unannounced, ripping through the walls we once called skin, scraping the edges of what we believed would last, etching names into dust. Strength bends before the slow tide, not in defeat, but in recognition— the battle was never ours to win. We call it endurance, but it is merely motion— forward, like rain drilling hunger into stone, erasing mountains one drop at a time. I watched my grandfather claw at the sheets, his fingers curling through the air, grasping at something only he could see. Even then, the river pulled— dragging him inch by inch toward the mouth of the sea. Time does not wound. It does not heal. It does not pause for reckoning. It only moves— a river without mercy, indifferent to the bodies it carries, the voices it drowns, the names it swallows before they are even cold. And yet, we hold— brittle bridges of bone and memory, stacking our moments like stones against the flood, as if trembling hands could dam the current, as if resistance could be anything more than the illusion of stillness in a moving tide. But the river is patient. It will have us all. It takes without knowing, forgets without grief, and leaves only echoes where names once stood. There is no escape. No deal to be made. Only the river, and the experience of being carried through.