On a whim…

Sometimes grief does not cry out—it drifts, carried by the same current that once bore our joy.

There are moments when loss comes not as thunder but as reflection—when the world stands still, and what we see is not the end but a continuation, changed in form.
I wrote this after a dream of a river and a face that was both Ophelia’s and hers—the one I loved more than life itself.
It is not about death, not really. It’s about arrival: the mystery of the one who was, the one who is, and the one who has yet to come.
I offer it here in gratitude and quiet wonder, a meditation on how love endures beyond the reach of hands.

⸻

I see Ophelia floating, dreamlike,
on the current of a cold river.
The water moves with a whispering insistence,
brushing against stones polished by centuries of sorrow.

Her body is already still,
her face molded by the mercy of the chill
into a child’s perpetual smile.

Then the surface wavers,
and I recognize the curve of her mouth—
not Shakespeare’s daughter of grief,
but the woman I loved more than life itself.

The recognition is the wound.
Not that she is gone,
but that I can no longer feel the warmth
that once made her real.
The ache lives in my hands,
in what they remember
and the water refuses to return.

Yet even as I kneel on the bank,
a strange peace rises.
The river does not end;
it only carries her beyond my reach.
In its mirrored flow I see three arrivals:

the one who was — radiant and laughing in sunlight;
the one who is — still, luminous, beyond decay;
and the one who is yet to come —
the presence that will meet me when my own current slows.

I do not call it faith,
only recognition —
that love does not vanish;
it merely changes address.

The current carries her onward,
and somewhere downstream,
in water not yet visible,
I believe she waits —
not to return,
but to receive.

⸻

And so I let the river keep her, trusting that love, like water, knows its way home.

A lyrical reflection on loss and arrival. Through the image of a woman floating on a twilight river, “Where All Waters Join” explores how love endures beyond separation, and how grief, carried by the current, can become peace.