EDWIN JONES

The feelings and words float past, bobbing in the river that rushes by me. After so many days of rain, the river near my childhood town is very alive. I am sitting beside a man who has many memories of someone who used to be me.

Fifteen years since we sat and watched this river flow by. In the air, the pulsating sound of cicadas on a hot day. The gum tree’s leaves could not hang lower, shy and tired from the heat. Sitting in the grooves of the flat rock bed, shaped by the endless time of water and seasons. I don’t even know how the situation allowed for this moment as we chuckle that it was almost exactly to the day he experienced Australia for the first time. Usually, he is in the US, and I am in Thailand. But our visits neatly collided. At that other time, it was my wise idea to pick him up from the airport from his early morning landing and take him straight to the middle of the bush, to my quiet place. Others may have questioned what this crazy Aussie was doing. It was an innocent and simple expression. That guy who was and is me, showing someone the first place he wanted this man from South Dakota to feel, touch and see. And now I see that same wonder reflected in his eyes, and nothing had changed in that look.

I always find that the best way to honour moments is through words. And very rarely in the moment, as most find it odd or too intense. I leave it until the thoughts have settled downstream, amongst the shade and moss of the next day or so. As you write, more thoughts catch up with you, and you watch each one arrive, allowing yourself to smile at the echo of a past burst of laughter or sigh at a wound that used to hurt so bad.

After spending so much time walking our separate paths over the past fifteen years, I was incredibly grateful to have spent a day sitting by the river with him, reflecting on how we had grown up. There is the residual pain, like the underwater grooves in the rocks. They are there but no longer jagged. Their importance is no longer. So we catch up, embrace the moment, and step up and away from the still bushland; it fills us with happiness as we return to the worlds we now find ourselves in with a leaf stowed away in my shoe.