The Water Remembers
What You Poured Into It

Nora had not slept through a whole night in three years. She knew the exact count — one thousand and nine nights of waking at 2:47 a.m., heart thundering, sheets damp, the room pressing in around her like a held breath that would not release. She had been told by two psychologists, a GP in Geelong, and a well-meaning sister that she was safe now. Nora believed them the way you believe a weather forecast: intellectually, temporarily, never quite in your bones.

She came to the valley by accident, the way people always come to the places that change them. A back road outside Healesville, a flat tyre she didn't have the right spanner for, and then the light going golden-amber through the mountain ash while she waited for the RACV. The gully to her left fell away steeply to a creek she could hear before she could see — a low, continuous murmur, like someone reading aloud in the next room.

She followed it without thinking. That was the thing about the creek: you didn't decide to follow it. Your feet simply assumed the decision had been made.

The water was tea-coloured from tannins, clear as glass over the pale stones. It ran fast in the middle and slower at the edges, and at one bend it pooled in a shallow basin ringed by tree ferns. Nora sat on a rock and took off her shoes. She had not taken her shoes off outside in years. Something about the exposure of it — feet bare on the ground, nowhere to run — had become impossible to manage. But the rock was warm from the afternoon sun, and the water moved with such obvious purpose that she felt, for a moment, watched over.

She lowered her feet into the shallows.

The cold was immediate and total. She gasped, and the gasp undid something in her chest — some careful architecture of control that she had been maintaining for so long she'd mistaken it for her actual personality. Her eyes filled with tears that had nothing to do with the temperature.

Nora did not startle. Later she would find this strange, that her body — which startled at car doors and raised voices and the ordinary sounds of living — did not flinch at a voice rising from a mountain creek in the Yarra Ranges. Perhaps there was a threshold of strangeness beyond which the nervous system simply gave up gatekeeping.

The speaker was not a person but a shape in the water: a deepening of the current's colour, a suggestion of something long and patient moving just below the surface. The waterhole, Nora realised, had eyes the colour of lichen.

"What are you?" she asked.

"Old," it said. "Older than what happened to you, and older than your fear of it. Both are true at once. Most things are."

She sat with this. Downstream, a grey fantail bounced on a fern frond, absolutely unconcerned with anything happening in the pool.

"I lose time," she said. It was the first time she had said it plainly, without apology or clinical framing. "I'm somewhere and then I'm somewhere else and I don't know what happened in between. It started after —" She stopped. Started again. "It started after the thing that started it."

"Yes," said the water. "You pour yourself out and then can't find where you've gone."

"That's exactly it."

"Water remembers everything poured into it. Every stone it's touched, every drought it's survived, every tree root it's fed. You are not lost, Nora. You're distributed. Some of you is here and some of you is still back there, and the work is not to destroy the part that's still back there, but to call it forward gently, the way you'd call a child who is frightened in the dark."

She thought of herself at twenty-nine, in a room she did not want to remember, and she tried for the first time not to hate that woman for staying too long. She tried instead to imagine reaching back toward her. Come on, she thought. It's different now. I've got shoes off and bare feet in a mountain creek and there's something ancient in the water telling me I'm not broken.

She stayed until the sun dropped behind the ridgeline and the air went cold with the particular authority that Victorian evenings have in autumn. When she climbed back to the road, the RACV man was there with his van, looking mildly concerned.

"Got a spare?" he asked.

"No," said Nora. "But I think I got something else."

She went back the following Saturday, and the Saturday after that. The shape in the water was always there — never demanding, never telling her what she ought to feel. It asked questions the way water asks its way through country: patiently, around obstacles, finding the path of least resistance to the sea.

One Thursday in June — not a Saturday, not a planned day — she slept until 6:15 a.m. and woke not to a thundering heart but to a thin winter sun crossing her bedroom wall. She lay there for a long moment, taking stock of herself. All present. No missing hours. No locked rooms in the chest.

She drove to the valley that afternoon to say thank you.

The waterhole was still and clear and full of sky.

She left her shoes on the rock again, and sat, and felt the ancient cold, and wept — not from the temperature this time, but from something that had no name in any language she'd been taught, though it felt like the very first morning of something.