Water

Do not go near the water at night. Or at all.

I'm serious, though. Grandma said even she didn't believe when the elders spoke of it in her times. Like water is just water. But trust me. I mean, why would you trust a random writer on a random website writing for some competition, must be all fake and/or overblown? Yeah.

I will tell you about my colleague now. I will call him a colleague because saying friend hurts. This word means he had once been alive, and in my heart I am not to feel a man more alive and with a more Sun-like presence.

He had radiant eyes. I cannot describe them as light blue, nor sky blue nor tirquoise. I cannot really describe them at all. Kind of slanted, flecked with black dots.

My friend, he knew of the Water.

We did construction work together. I was a woman and young, so they instinctivelly kept me off the building and on the ground carrying the boards and cement sacks. He climbed and carried the same things, but upwards. He has a beautiful wife, works like a dog. Multiple kids. After work, he did some other gigs. At least two more places. Came in here sick, coughed when the overview guy passed by the corner. He was always in pain. He wasn't really pathetic or existential about it, it had just been that way. Muscles tense and cramped around his spine from physical strain, stress, all neverending.

Now he was still young at the time, with such mind and a body that forgot to keep up, slowly losing strands of youth one after the other, the way hair greys. He frequented bars, concerts. Met a beautiful woman that dragged him by the hand into a niche and read from his palm." It will be short and you will struggle." He turned and started to go, but she grabbed a random guy from the crowd and faced them one to the other. "You can trade, though. You and he." And he stood perplexed. The second guy is his primary school friend. Always been a good man. Straight from school to work, never asked questions, pure like a mountain stream. "Lost contact, but I stayed sure", my friend said. The guy was still pure. Had two babies recently. Three cats. A happy heart beating in his chest.

The guy didn't even muster up a "What the fuck". He smiled, friendly as he'd always been.

"Get out, and fuck you until the end of time", my friend had told the woman.

That's when his spine began hurting unbearably. Sickness came and thank God, went. Cuts healed. But the pain never subsided. I'd go behind the site to piss and catch him crouching behind a pile of bricks with a scarily contorted face. He wouldn't tell until I asked. Nothing helped him, at least nothing he could pay for. I'd try to help and he'd refuse. I would go, lie in my bed and sleep, and he would lie tossing on an uncomfortable mattress, spasms keeping his vision red-hot until the morning. That's what I pictured. His eyes were always the same color when I met him. Never spoke of anything, but the other mouths started noticing and telling.

"And I could not let my wage dwindle", he told me one night. He started going to the same venue digging around for the woman. And there she is this one night. She offers him the same thing. But the person she pulls from the crowd is his seven year old daughter.

"WHAT THE FUCK"

He did not go again. The daughter could not remember getting there but went home unharmed.

He began drinking heavily after work. And during. I cannot remember the time when he didn't drink, dulled muscle aches that way. But now his spine had him in a death grip. As always, I'd stay and drink with him. He had his limits, and they were... basically unreachable.

Yet one night we stayed and I cannot remember how things exactly unfolded. We got drunk as dogs. At one point we fell asleep with our backs to a freshly cemented wall.

I had dreamt of a big water by which we stood. Someone directed my friend towards it and he went, but I cannot point out who that was. He swam good. I plopped in clumsily – why, well I was drunk. He swam, I struggled to follow. I really tried. But I felt my body tiring, and pain and sadness eating up my heart. I watched the catastrophe unfold. A voice broke out from somewhere. The language was not English. It was one both he and I understood, for it had called to us from before. Before what? Before.

"Here it lies, the water, and in the water you swim, and this water, it is his spinal liquor. Do you hear that? Do you hear your arms flapping in the water, your breath struggling. This is his body writhing in pain. Every stroke you make pains him, every breath of yours burns hot and damages his spine even more. Are you a good friend now? Are you? Are you a good man now?"

I gasped with no breath. But the voice continued:

"You are not, for why have you come to the water? He came to me twice. He had his chance MULTIPLE times. Now he can lie painlessly, but let go, stop hirting him and let me drown in his blue eyes, for I want them, and I want them now."

At once I gave up. For this is a choice you won't understand if you haven't been close to the Sun. The Sun has many things it shines on, but you, you feel the Sun once and you cannot survive without the Sun. And he was the Sun.

"Stop this at once. For good." He did not scream at the voice but I myself shook from his anger. I had not sunk that night. Red flashed, and he outstretched his arms, water rippled angrily in a tempest no river has ever known, his eyes, his arms around me, a stream with no shore, and then I could breathe, breathe, breathe.

I have reminisced since. My grandmother told me of the water as someting sacred and untouchable. But I think now that this thing that decieved us – me – and the Water, the holy place of night unreachable to human efforts and a rational mind, are not the same place. She spoke of the stream in her village which judged and took at it desired, but in justice and truth.

When I woke up with my back sore to the brick wall, our bottles sat empty. No sight of him. My friend, I've heard, had disappeared. "Left his wife", said evil voices, "dipped", mumbled ones that bowed to the self-proclaimed water, the easy holiness, the ones who believed they had other people's lives scrunched up in their palms. But I believed he had truly seen the Water. The just one.