One moment I was warm; the next, I was breaking the surface of a river — heavy, cold, and loud. I crawled onto the bank, gasping, my body suddenly wrapped in a weight that felt like I was wearing wet stone. The air was too bright. The trees were too sharp. The roar of the water filled my ears, a sound that didn't breathe, that only took.

  I lay in the mud for a long time, waiting for the spinning to stop. This was what I had left. This was the dive.

  When I finally stood up, the path home didn't look right. I stood at the fork where the birch trees lean over the track, and I waited for them to look familiar. They didn't. They looked like trees drawn by someone who had never seen a tree, only heard them described.

  I took two wrong turns before the woods started making sense. My boots sank into mud that felt too thick, too grabbing. With every step, the air seemed to gain density, pressing against my chest like I was walking into a headwind that wasn't there. I had to think about breathing. In. The resistance of the ribs. Out. The rattle in the throat. It wasn't just fatigue. It was the specific, crushing gravity of a place that didn't want you to move through it easily.

  At the ridge I stopped. Below, the settlement sat along the bank — chimneys trailing smoke, nets hung between poles, a woman carrying a basin toward the water. I could see the drying racks where they laid out the fish I brought up. The whole of it visible from here — all those roofs, all those hearths, all fed from the same cold river that had just tried to keep me.

  But I kept walking because Liora was at home. Every day she is waiting for me. And every day I bring her less of myself than I did the day before.

  The cottage came into view. Small as it always was. Just a step from the river, but hidden — my small piece of the world tucked inside the vast world that lives around it. I stood at the door for a moment longer than I needed to, head heavy with the same thought I carry back from every dive: What will she say? What have I forgotten this time?

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  I stepped inside.

  "Good evening, dear."

  "Hello, dear. How was the dive?"

  She asked the way she always asks — like she already knew the answer and was giving me one last chance to say something different.

  "Fine," I said.

  She didn't look up from the stove. There was bread on the table, a fire in the hearth, dried herbs hanging from the beam above the basin — thyme, and something else I used to know the name of. The floorboards were worn smooth in a path between the stove and the table, a groove made by years of her feet. The cottage was warm in a way that should have felt like home but tonight felt like a room I was visiting.

  She set a plate in front of me. Stew, thick and dark, the surface catching the firelight.

  "Did you eat down there?" she asked.

  "I'm not hungry."

  "You're bleeding."

  I looked at my hands. She was right. I hadn't noticed. The knuckles were raw, split open where the river rocks had taken their tithe. I wiped them on my trousers — a habit she hated — and picked up the spoon.

  She sat down across from me and waited. She wasn't eating. She was watching my hands.

  "Do you know what day it is?" she asked softly.

  I paused, the spoon halfway to my mouth. I reached for the day, but it wasn't there. Monday? Friday? The days had blurred into a single, grey loop of water and fatigue.

  I shook my head.

  "You've been gone three days, Elan."

  Three days.

  I stared at her. I thought it had been an hour. Maybe two. I opened my mouth to say something — an explanation, an apology, I'm not sure which — but nothing came. The gap between what I thought was true and what was actually true had gotten too wide to speak across.

  So we ate in silence. The stew tasted like salt and not much else. The fire popped, and neither of us flinched. She deserved more than this. I knew it before anyone could have told me — the body knows, even when the rest of you has stopped listening. I just couldn't remember what "more" was supposed to look like.