I would like to think she turns around and goes home and does one thing differently that day because of what she has imagined, and again the day after that, and the day after that.

But water doesn't care for human sorrows. It flows without slowing or quickening its pace in the darkness of the earth, where only stones will hear.

Sometimes it is necessary to step into darkness alone and find your way back. To carry something with you into light you could not have found anywhere else.

Of all silences I had encountered this was the gravest and most inevitable: not the silence of secrets, but of knowing.

Silence is not empty or immaterial, and it is not needed to chain tame things. It often guards powers strong enough to shatter everything.

Secrets carve us like water carves stone. On the surface nothing will shift, but things we cannot tell anyone chafe and consume us, and slowly our life settles around them, moulds itself into their shape.Secrets gnaw at the bonds between people. Sometimes we believe they can also build them: if we let another person into the silent space a secret has made within us, we are no longer alone there.

Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn't afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn't hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all eginnings and ends. On the surface nothing will shift, but deep in underground silence, water will hide and with soft fingers coax a new channel for itself, until stone gives in and slowly settles around the secret space. Death is water's close companion, and neither of them can be separated from us, for we are made of the versatilitiy of water and the closeness of death. Water doesn't belong to us, be we belong to water: when it has passed through our fingers and pores and bodies, nothing separates us from earth.

The world will not spin slower or faster when we have passed through the gate together. What remains is light on water, or a shifting shadow.