Willows overhead sway softly. A cicada chirps quietly. Dragonflies come and go, still, then gone; rabbits rest, still, then gone. A tranquil breeze twirls through the atmosphere. Petals dance merrily. Too soon, they touch the ground, helpless, unmoving. The moss surrounding the riverbank flourishes, caressed by the delicate footsteps of ladybirds. A robin lands furiously. The ladybirds are gone.
The girl sits next to the riverbank, motionless next to the fleeting moments in front of her eyes. The water gently moves, flowing towards the west. Bobbing lilypads sleep on its surface. Waterflies scurry by. The river continues forward.
Rivers flow with freedom, but with a sense of boldness, even the calmest streams; they flow as though no force can stop them, the water on an endlessly shifting journey to carry along its tiny bubbles, its fragile wildlife, its loose tufts of algae, to somewhere odd, a mysterious place unknown to those who have never ridden the current.
The girl observes the soft waters, quiet and unmoving next to its current. Fish fight against the tiny waves, and the sun above shines on the water with amusement, seeing their disobedience only lead to the tiny creatures getting pulled back the other way.
With the sun moving closer downwards, a shadow soon begins to loom over the river.
It sways gently at first, but slowly, hands reach out, stick-like.
Suddenly, a shadow of a skeleton begins to emerge. Its body towers over the river, then looms over the girl. It reaches out for her, clawing with bony fingers.
It is him. The boy.
The water freezes; the current of time falls prey to the shadow. Gasping, the girl stumbles back, quivering wildly, and she scrambles backwards, her hands uncontrollably shaking. The boy’s shadow inches closer. I’m not dead if I continue to be with you. Friends are forever, right? A haunting echo drapes over the voice, trapping the girl in confusion, a fog of helplessness.
The tree beside the river abruptly sways left. The shadow dissipates.
The tree giggles at the girl. What an imagination. Get over it. It waves its branches mockingly, imitating her frantic scrambling.
And the stream continues to flow, moving steadily to the west. The boy was never there; her figment of imagination had vanished without even touching the river’s current.
The girl knows he was not there, yet she cannot stop shaking. She can barely breathe, her body shaken and trampled as if she had been fully embedded into the ground, trapped and held hostage from moving forward, buried, alive, next to the dead boy. She forces herself onto her knees, stumbling away from the flowers she had just trampled into lifelessness, and she staggers away from the stream’s current. The shadow, although gone from her vision, refuses to leave her body. It tries to halt her in place, but she takes it a step further; she begins to run, her mind cloaked in eerie darkness, shrouded in fog blocking her from seeing the current of time. She rushes to the east, away from the river’s flow, away from the dashing dragonflies and scurrying waterflies, away from the rushing and bustling and gone-too-soon nature of nature, away from it all, desperately trying to pull back time, to just turn back a current that she cannot turn.
She runs from the sun’s indefinitely moving arc. She runs from the endless flow of the river.
Soon, she is gone without a trace, lost in her fruitless war against time.