by Mizuki Yamamoto

The Charles. I am three years old and I speak two languages. Three if you count the babble of toddler —a language made of noise and gestures, understood by every child at the daycare, even though none of us are from the same country. I live on the 23rd floor of a building overlooking the river, and from the green couch by the window, I count the white triangle sails like paper cuts against the water. I show my parents how to swipe a credit card, doing their shopping for them by running the plastic along the crevice between the cushions. 

Downstairs, my friend runs out in the street and is hit by a car. I remember the adults gathering—a storm of legs and voices. Between them, I watch as a stuffed toy and a piece of clothing get plucked out from beneath the metal. I think he is okay, but I don’t actually know.

 

The Tama. There is an Inu-Tama Neko-Tama park by Tamagawa. I beg my mom to take me there so I can admire all the yapping and the soft fur of the cats and dogs who must live there. I don’t remember if she ever takes me, but I remember long afternoons of imagining—my very own dog, even though I’m allergic. 

Twenty years later, I am on a train and pass by the Nikotama station which reminds me. I check Google Maps but it doesn’t seem to exist anymore—and back then, Google didn’t exist either. There’s nothing about it online. My mom says the park was real, but I’m no longer sure. Just that the river will always make me think of floppy ears and bodies made of hope, whiskers and heartbeats—reckless, warm, a fleeting blur. 

The Hudson. It is the year 2000 and I have just moved to New York and started first grade. The next year, something catastrophic tears apart the city, and the skyline we can see all the way from our riverfront park 15 miles upstream changes irreversibly. Our teachers are sad, our parents are shaken. 

The television replays it like a permanently oozing wound. Gray smoke billowing over a rectangular sky. Some of my friends never see their dad, or uncle, ever again. My dad’s friend loses his twenty-three-year-old daughter. She babysat me once. We dug an igloo in the backyard. I am only eight, but I understand when things will never be the same. I am learning about the shape of the world—how easily it fractures, folds.

Los Angeles. It is baffling to call this a river, the way it’s encased in concrete on all sides. They tell me somewhere upstream, it is actually a river the way most rivers are. Wet, tangled with cattails, whispering in the reeds, threaded with minnows and riparian birdsong. 

It is hard to imagine the colors green and blue in this place, but I meet a boy here who smells like a forest and I call him mine. We skip along the concrete embankment and lay on our backs in the heat of summer, trying to sift constellations from headlights, waving away smog and half-hearted attempts at love, like blinking satellites—trusting gravity and centripetal motion would keep us tethered—but learning eventually, that they litter the skies at the end of their operational life, spinning endlessly in a graveyard orbit of dead things.

The Thames. I like how close the lights are to the water here, the way everything leans towards one another despite the British indifference, the tight-lipped grace. The streets are cobbled, old and damp, none of them laid in a neat parallel or named in any sort of order. It is easy to get lost and never find the people I’m supposed to be meeting with. A fox crosses in front of me. There is a mouse—no, a rat—in its mouth. They become one silhouette before they disappear down an alley. 

It is winter. The days are short. It rains every other day, and the whole place gleams—as if the city is half underwater already. Down in the riverbank, a man is sculpting an enormous sleeping face out of sand. It is the size of a car, but in the morning, when the tide rises, she will be gone. Overhead, the glowing London Eye spins, and spins. 

Rio de la Plata. It’s supposed to mean river of silver but it is the brownest river I have ever seen. It laps in a way I have seen other ones flow, and if it were a creature with feet, it is slow and lumbering. A tour guide says, it is perhaps not a river, but an estuary, a gulf, or a marginal sea. If it is a river, it is the widest in the world at 220 kilometers, which is the distance from Los Angeles to the Mojave Desert, London to Belgium, the Charles to the Hudson, or, as wide as Japan is wide. Everything is about perspective. 

In a week’s time, I will say “yes” to the love of my life in the middle of the Atacama Desert. The tour guide says, this is a place of confluence, where two rivers join before emptying into the Atlantic. 

The Colorado. In July, we stand on a mountain summit under the blaze of a high-altitude sun, a few miles from the headwaters where the creeks are named Blue and Eagle and Roaring Fork. They rise from the continental divide where it forms the boundary between two immense watersheds, dancing beneath the hooves of elk. 

Our two dogs carry the rings. The journey continues over layers and layers of sedimentary memories, over tectonic uplift. The water cuts, incises through death and rock, widening a path through past and present. Still, this one is only 75 million years old, as young as the allosaurus, beginning when temperate rainforests still enchanted the poles. When flowers first bloomed and colored the world.

Mizuki Yamamoto (often writing under Mizuki Yamagen) is a writer from Japan, living in the Rocky Mountains. Her writing has appeared in HAD and is forthcoming at SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, Flash Flood, and other places. Find her at mizukiyamagen.com and @mizukiyamagen.bsky.social