After I Fell

I was a thin green stem when the river first learned the shape of my shadow. Its voice was bright then—clear water folding over stone, sunlight trembling on its surface as if the day itself were shivering. I knew nothing of years. I knew only the slow pull of the earth asking me to stay, to root, to listen. Seasons gathered around me in widening circles. Spring pressed soft rain into my bark. Summer stretched long and golden across my leaves. Autumn brushed me with the scent of smoke and distant endings. Winter laid its cold hand on my trunk and taught me the patience of stillness. I grew ring by ring, each one a quiet memory I did not choose but accepted. The land was open in those early centuries. Grass moved like a single creature in the wind. Deer stepped through the morning mist with the gentleness of breath. Birds nested in my branches and taught me the language of wings. The river was my companion—restless, shimmering, always speaking. I learned its moods the way humans learn their own heartbeat. Then came footsteps. Soft at first, curious, leaving only faint impressions in the soil. A single shelter rose near the riverbank, its smoke curling upward like a question. More footsteps followed. More shelters. The land began to hum with voices, tools, laughter, the clatter of things being built. I watched without fear. Change was not new to me; I had been born into it. The river changed with them. Its edges sharpened where stones were moved. Its surface clouded where soil was disturbed. Children played along its banks, their shouts ringing through my branches like bright birdsong. Some carved their names into my bark, not knowing I felt the pressure but not the pain. I held their secrets in my rings, quiet and uncomplaining. Years folded into decades. Decades into centuries. The village grew, and the river darkened. What had once been clear as morning glass turned murky, then thick, then nearly black. Machines arrived—heavy, trembling things that sent shivers through my roots. The air filled with smoke and iron. The river’s voice grew hoarse, as though forgetting how to speak. I watched it all. I could do nothing else. The village swelled, then thinned. Buildings rose and fell. Roads cracked. Windows shattered. The river, once the heart of everything, became something people hurried past without looking. Its surface no longer reflected the sky; it swallowed it. Time thinned the village. People left. The machines fell silent. The river moved more slowly, as if exhausted by centuries of carrying what was never meant for it. I stood through it all—storms, droughts, winters that split my bark, summers that scorched my leaves. My branches grew wide enough to shelter generations of birds. My roots reached deep enough to remember the first clear voice of the river. And then, one morning, footsteps returned. Not the soft, curious ones of long ago. These were hurried, heavy, edged with desperation. Voices rose—sharp, strained, full of a fear I could not name. They circled me, measured me, pressed their hands against my trunk as though searching for something I did not have. I did not understand their urgency. I had lived through centuries of storms and silence. I had watched the river change its face a hundred times. I had seen the land reshape itself without asking permission. I had never imagined that I, too, could be reshaped. When they came for me, the river held its breath. What happened after is something only the water knows. My fall was brief, but the moment after—when the world tilted, when the sky slipped from my branches, when the river caught whatever remained of me—stretched into a silence deeper than any winter I had ever known. And the river carried that silence away.