RIVER TWO
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"I'm stopping here."
"You gotta take a pee. Go ahead. You don't need my permission."
It was the same place in the river. The brush was drier and sparser from seasons of drought but it was recognizable. I hiked down to where I had first entered the water. I stood on the bank and watched the river. The flow was not the forceful coursing that I remembered. It was peaceful and hypnotic. I moved down the bank trying to follow the path that I had once stumbled along. I can't say I recognized the obstacles in the river. Maybe they had changed or been worn away. I came to the beach where I had been laid out and my eyes filled with the river and then with the sand and then they began to twinge. I didn't know Post Traumatic Syndrome then. Not much had been dissiminated about it to the general public. I didn't know that smell and humidity could play tricks of time and place on the mind. I didn't know that similarities in locale could transport a person to a place of trauma as real as the present. I never knew what it must have taken to overcome the abject fear, what it must have taken to enter the water that held such treachery, to summon what was left of you beneath the layers of war and pain and dope, to summon the best part of you one more time to pull out a friend. But I knew Rallio. And I had failed to recognize him.
I sat on the bank, my head in my hands, my eyes blinking back the stinging salt, and I was cold.