These years later you’re still dreaming of the river. It’s in the sad way you drink your tea, and in the look you get sometimes as you stare into the distance, as though if you only search hard enough those beloved waters might come into view. I remember our departure; we left our collection of teapots on the shelves and I don’t know why we took so much care locking up when we knew we’d never be back. The sacred tree where spirits dwelt seemed to weep into the brown waters that snaked their way round the back of our garden. A wall came down between us as we bid our little house farewell: for me it would be a homecoming, for you, exile. We learned later that we got out just in time. The next day soldiers came and burnt it to the ground. But for us it would always exist as it did that day: glorious in its smallness and modesty.
Flung across the ocean from your place to mine, where there was too much of everything. Too much space. Too much money. Too much emptiness. In time you learned to love the sea as well, but it was different: something wild and violent that could never belong to you. People, for the most part, were kind, but they acted as if you’d won some kind of lottery in being allowed to come here, and you’d nod and smile and say how thankful you were, and only I could see the things you couldn’t explain. Being forced to flee your country is never a gift.
You let life drag you along in whatever direction it chose, as though in losing the river you had also lost the thread of your destiny, leaving you to wander the world like a stranger, naked and alone. You were a person who’d devoted their life to grand ideals, ideals that had been betrayed and eventually deemed obsolete. You’d fought on the side of humanity in a battle you were never going to win.
Now it is enough to seek out teapots for our new collection in musty op-shops and to sit together in the stillness of the afternoon, watching the lorikeets hanging in the wattle tree. Our love had been a raucous celebration. Now it is quiet.
Little by little the sickness of your heart becomes the sickness of your body. Sometimes you suffer in silence and sometimes you cry out. On nights when the rain falls heavy, just like the monsoon, you weep softly; I know not if in pain or in despair.
One afternoon as I pour your tea, you smile and say enough. I’ve loved you too long not to know what you mean. I prepare for you the final dose, the too-much medicine that will be your only relief. And as I watch you disappear I see the river running through you, carrying you back to the only place you ever belonged.
Amy Ward-Smith is an Australian writer and mother of three boys. She has spent much of the last five years in South-East Asia, but is now residing in her hometown on the eastern coast of Australia.
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–Art by Menerva Tau
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