The Nymph

I watched the boy, the boy on the bank, picking up pebbles and throwing them into the dark, dirty river. When his hands grew brown from dirt and dust, he washed them in the calm, almost stagnant water. His shirt looked foreign to me with names of bands of which I have never heard; they might as well have been from Brazil and very well could have been. I watched the boy, the single, lonesome boy, who often comes down onto my banks since his parents, when they were at home, forbade him from climbing the high cliff overlooking the river, and saw him pick up the stone, my stone, and I remembered when I was a young boy, and so I ran back into my mind and traveled on that long, beaten path that I always take to travel back to my own time, the time when I was younger, the time when I am but a lad of eleven and have my first case of puppy love. But this puppy was beaten and I lost all sense of love so I walk back to my first crush, the same secret spot that I always visit when I am sad, tired, lonely.

While walking over to the bank and sitting on its silty shore, I look at the pebbles embedded in the ground and see a stone very different from any others. It looks cold, metallic, like a silver, flat ball bearing, but the weeds around it are black, charred, simply burnt. I put my hand down and pick up the small stone and hold it in my palm. It sings with one voice, the voice of a woman sobbing into the wind, and you hear the wind carry those dreamy, melancholic cries. She sings a song of love-struck youth and leaving lovers and lonely lust. I listen to the song and look at the stone, hypnotized by the voice and the lyrics. I raise my head, tears forming in the corners of my eyes, and see a woman standing on the opposite shore of the narrow river.

She wears a bolt of silver cloth wound simply around her body, showing her curves with each pass of the satin sheets. Her hair is long and black with streaks of ashy gray; it covers one of her eyes. I am glad she doesn’t show both eyes for I don’t think I could stay relatively dry eyed. Her one eye that does show is without an iris for her pupil overtakes it and the white of her eye is not white but glitter for it shines with the sun reflecting in her tears. She is the lover from the song and I wanted to hug her and comfort her, brush her hair, and tell her that life will be okay. She opens her mouth and the same voice that sings the song in the stone tells the story of her love.

She tells me of how they met, one skipping through a field of wildflowers and meeting the other, who was painting the landscape, and how they used to lay a blanket down in the middle of a meadow and write sonnets and showed their love. She tells me how he had to leave, not for war but for peace, and how they had vowed not to love anyone else. She tells me of how she waited for her love to come back but she knew that peace missions do not always end peacefully so she came to the river and saw the cliff. She tells me how she climbed the cliff face, on the side with the gradual slope, and how she almost fell down but she caught herself on her nails and pulled herself up but she tore off the nail on her ring finger. She tells me how she stood on the overlook and peered down into the river; how she leapt off of the overlook and, with her arms spread out, flipped; how her head hit the water and her neck instantly broke but, in that instant, felt horrible pain, a pain she had never felt before but not a pain that others haven’t felt. It was a pain like childbirth, a pain that must be bared in order to gain a better gift than then before.

Her words reiterate what her eye already tells me; that she’s filled with loneliness, longing, depression.

I wish just to love her but she has already died and I cannot touch her immortal spirit with my mortal hands, but that does not stop her from calling to me. She calls and calls with that dreamy, entrancing voice, and with each call, my will weakens and weakens, taking my feet one step, two steps closer to the water. I fight back with my spiritual hands, catching each blow but the story she told had sapped my strength and I am weakening quickly.

She starts to walk over the river, though her glide seems to move faster than it should, and our eyes never leave one another’s. She continues to glide and I continue to walk toward the river and though her dress touches the water and her feet touch the river, the cloth remains dry and the water remains placid, unrippled, glass-like. Her voice continues to sing, as does the stone, which is still in my hand, and I continue to weaken and succumb to her will and to her loneliness.

My feet touch the cold water, below freezing yet ice does not form, but I barely notice. I reach out my hand and she reaches out with hers and our fingers touch like Adam and God though I am a boy and she is a goddess, no matter how minor in the hierarchy. Her touch is cold, like dry ice, and my body loses heat, like eating ice cream on a cold day; you’re already cold and you get colder with each lick, scoop, cone. She embraces me and our lips meet and our tongues tangle and I find myself looking in my eyes.

We release and she steps back and I see her in a body, a mortal body. She speaks and tells me good-bye and she walks away from the bank and my jaw drops. I watch her walk away with short, blonde hair and an emerald sweatshirt, and I know what I am already wearing: silver, satin sheets showing my curves. She stole my body and I am in hers. But her body is not the only thing I own now; she left her loneliness. I was lonely before but now I am alone, the same but different.

I am now the woman and am alone and am walking back on that beaten path and I was the woman still but that boy, that boy on the bank, is holding my stone. I, the nymph of this muddy river, appeared before the boy, the young, lonesome lad, and told him my story, a story that my nymph told me, which I embellished with each telling. He weakened his will with his weeping eyes and we embraced and we released. I felt happy and fulfilled, my depression departed and my loneliness lifted. I saw him now in my old body, not as a boy but as the nymph, and I smirked, partly to myself, partly to no one at all. Finally, after scores of years, I became a mortal once more, and I never felt pity for the new nymph for the old one had felt none for me. I thought that I should return the favor the nymph before me gave and continue the informal ritual, and so I did.

In those dozens of years that I was that nymph, I was thinking about why it continues; it being, of course, the process of having a mortal turn immortal until a new mortal comes by the river and picks up that fate changing stone. I thought and thought and thought. Did it ever hit me? It did come though not as a hit. It gradually awakened; it crawled to me like a toddler to it's mother, but once I knew why, I never forgot, forget, or will forget.

And so, with me as the not-so-lonesome lad and the new nymph retreating back to her stone, I left to make new friends and learn to be lonely no more, forever and ever. I was never lonely but I never loved, for my time as the nymph spoiled that feeling for I found what love truly was and is. Love, any love even Mother and Child or Master and Dog, is there as a foil; it is not a feeling by itself; it is only there to stop that loneliness. Since I no longer have loneliness, I no longer have love, and so when I die, and I will, for no longer I am the nymph, immortal demon and patron saint of solitude, but a mortal man of elderly age, I will be alone, without a wife whom I truly love, though she may love me, paradoxically. Love is the easiest emotion to manipulate as the nymph showed me with her tall tale of the two lovers, then just one, and finally none. Sappy stories and clichéd lines form the basis of every relationship and romance yarns and even those "chick flicks" bring tears to the most hard of hearts. Does that make me sad, my lack of emotions and sensitivity, how I am now like one of those robots? No, for sadness is the sister of solitude, of loneliness, and I no longer attend those family reunions.

Epilogue: Loneliness is a solo, a nightmare, a test. The first because it is done alone, the second because it can be quite scary, and the third because if you’re not careful, you could fail. If one lonely person meets someone, they are lonely no more but somebody needs to be lonely, maybe the person that someone left behind, and, in this case, the person becomes the never-ending nymph. It’s just like all things, anger, joy, envy; you need them all in order for balance to reign. Is it impossible for loneliness to be impossible? Yes, as long as chaos and law, shade and light, undeniable good and unfaltering evil remain equal and balanced in the universe.