Stones Across the Water

The girl had come to the end of a row and stood turning over a question she had carried since the evening before. She knew now that the few words she set down could bring a day home to her again, but a different worry had risen in their place. For every line she wrote, a hundred things went unrecorded: the color of the light, the smell of the turned ground, the small unimportant words she and Nyra traded across the beds. She wondered whether a keeper, grown old, ever looked back and grieved for all she had chosen not to hold.

She put it to Nyra directly, while the older woman was tying back a bent stem. “Do you ever wish,” she asked, “that you had written more of it down? All the parts you left out. Do you come to miss them?” She half expected to hear that yes, a keeper learns to regret her silences, and that the book ought to have been fuller than she made it.

Nyra did not answer at once. She finished the knot, straightened, and looked out across the beds as though counting something only she could see. “A book keeps what my two hands did,” she said at last. “It was never meant to keep what I felt while I did it. That part I carry in myself, and it goes where I go. If I pressed all of it onto the page, I would only bruise it, and be left holding neither the doing nor the feeling clean.”

“The things you leave out are not lost,” she went on. “They are only left free. A day is too large to fit inside a book, and a wise keeper does not try to make it fit. She writes down the few firm things a later hand can stand on, and lets the rest go on living in her, unpinned. What you leave out you are keeping yet, only not in ink.”

The girl turned that over. She had been half afraid that every unwritten thing was a quiet loss, a leak in the account she was learning to keep. Now she saw it another way. The book was not a net flung to catch the whole day, but a line of firm stones laid across a wide water, enough to carry a person over and no more. The rest of the day had not drowned. It ran on beneath the stones, moving and alive, hers to hold without a single mark.