The Day the River Took My Friend

The story always starts here, in my memory

We were three boys,

barely twenty,

too young to think time could end,

too full of fire to imagine loss.

The river was our kingdom.

We’d sit on the same cracked bench,

wood splintered from seasons of rain,

feet dangling,

watching the water churn

as though it carried our secrets.

Ali always brought his guitar,

strings slightly out of tune—

but when he played,

It felt like the world tilted toward us,

Like even the sky bent down to listen.

We made promises there,

to never leave the city,

to make something of ourselves,

to stay unbroken

by the world waiting outside those afternoons.

But the bench is quieter now.

The summer it happened,

Ali’s laughter was the loudest.

I had ever heard.

He spoke of love

of a girl with jasmine in her hair,

and the way her eyes

pulled him into a future.

That night,

the road betrayed him.

A sudden storm,

a motorbike skidding on slick asphalt—

and the world closed its hands around him.

The next day,

the river kept moving,

indifferent as always.

I sat on the bench alone,

guitar leaning against my knee,

strings still trembling with the last song

he had played.

I tried to strum,

but my hands refused.

Grief had stolen the rhythm

from my fingers.

Even now,

decades later,

I pass that bench

and feel the silence rise.

The river is unchanged,

but I am not.

The boy who once believed

in endless afternoons

was buried beside Ali.

And though I walk on,

I never sit there again.

That bench belongs to ghosts now.