One October morning before my mother’s funeral, I bring you back to my Upstate hometown at the river confluence. Your long black curls tucked into a hoodie, your cold face a patient light smile in response to my stories of walking by here on the way to school. It was once a little forest of drugs and hidden things, but a lot had changed since I moved to California. The trees are paved over and stone semi-circle terraces are steps into the city’s focal point. From our right, a section of the Erie-canal-turned-river flows in and from the left, the serpentine Susquehanna where the two boys my age were rescued rafting over Rockbottom Dam in swift rainwater claiming the lives of three firemen saving them. The rivers lap together against the third step, and in the breeze I’m blown downstream in the aluminium boat my friends and I borrowed when we skipped class and explored an island like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. You interpret my silence as sadness and squeeze my hand, the cold river sucking heat from our bodies. Upriver, the 1887 steel bridge is closed except for foot traffic. You and I found each other in California but now squint trying to see past the bend, then reach in my pocket as your thin California blood shivers, your kind face soft and open as I read you my new poem that you think honors my mother, grief clinging to the grey air and falling in the misty rain, then I kneel, produce my grandmother’s diamond as cold as the river. It ends in Cymraeg words: Dwy afon gyda'i gilydd. Cartref. Two rivers together. Home. I slide it onto your finger with elemental difficulty as the sun cracks the sky and grief flows into joy.
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