The strangeness of certain rivers

The story begins, well, it's a narrative contrivance, no story ever really begins or ends. It's an arbitrary mark in the long stretch of sand that comprises TIME. And the mark itself is non-descript, indecipherable, the sound of an ancient language in the ear of a modern day listener.

I've gotten side tracked though. The story, if a story it is, isn't really important as a vector of explaining the irrationality or strangeness of time. Was it Borges or Augustine who said something along the lines of, I live by time all day long, checking my watch, knowing when to eat, when to sleep, when to read a book. And yet, when I stop and think about time it confounds me. It was Augustine, though if you've a disinclination toward religiosity credit it to Borges.

We were young boys then, home for the summer from colleges with different names. Some of them were located in beautiful cities, wreathed in emerald green water, where we'd spent the year unlearning our accents, our hair color, our old names for things that we'd loved.

Others of us were going to college in rural settings, biking around campus and waving hello to everyone like we were fu-ing born to it. Like we'd been riding around on bikes since the dawn of time. These bikes were like camels, and sometimes they would bite us, and we'd wobble on the street when we were waving to a pretty girl from French class who didn't seem to know our name though we were sure we'd told it to her. We'd sit in hot classrooms, flies circling lazily, aimlessly, seemingly knowing that their lives would be brief and so why spend it eating one's own innards? These were the thoughts of the flies mind you. We were arguing about the viability of the socialist state, about opening up our borders, developing fiber optic cables and using the internet to free the people.

Still others of us, Tomas and Rin were going to school in the mountains. At there school there were no formal classes, merely discussion groups conducted in worn cabins. It was the sort of place where the teachers all had scraggly and unkempt beards, wild eyes, and they slept with all the pretty girls. They told us that most of the semester was spent in silence, contemplating the world through the eyes of Plato or Aristotle, seeing the way the world might have been and sometimes trying to talk the pretty girls into sneaking away with them for a night, though they knew that ultimately they'd lose out to the wild-eyed professors who had done enough things already in life to be content, sitting on a mountain, talking about Hippocrates, Thales, Cicero, Rorty and sometimes sleeping with their students.

Two others, friends of mine since we took baths together as three year old's, went off to college in the city. There, they worked at jobs, at smoking cigarettes, at cultivating the right way to shape their mouth when blowing the smoke from a cigarette, or smiling at a woman from across a bar, defending, in just the right terms, capitalism, and their choice to intern at banks, to buy expensive drinks, and pretend to have always been from that city, to lay claim to new origin stories, stories that put them in the bowels of the city, born behind wrought iron fences beneath large and ornate gabled roofs.

There were eight of us that morning, standing in the shade of chestnut trees, somehow still alive, wildly inappropriate given our climate, probably imported. We'd spent the night before talking around a fire. It's amazing the capacity that fire has for truth. It awakens something primordial in us, and we all could see, though we weren't looking at one another beyond the brief second that it took to pass around a bottle of Tequila that we were shotgunning together, that what we had in common was boredom. We all knew that we had made the wrong choice. That two of us in the city were frauds who belonged in the mountains, debating Descartes, not footing bills for 19 dollar Manhattans. The two from the mountain belonged in the rural community. Shi-, those two guys had been biking to school since pre-school when they'd ridden the two blocks on Big Wheels. We'd done everything wrong.

The sun was high, and we stood at the edge of the water, stripped down to our underwear, already shivering from the thought of the cold water invading every part of us, changing the very constituent parts of our being as only water and liquor and certain women could. We'd never swam this particular river. In fact, Arturo didn't remember the river ever existing, though I seemed to remember hearing about it from my father while I was growing up, though I thought it was supposed to be at least twenty miles east of where we were. And yet, when we'd awoken in the morning, the realization from the fire and the tequila still in our hearts and bellies, and we saw that river that we must have been camping next to all night, though none of us could remember hearing the water, we knew that we had to swim across.

Jon was the first one to start running, and I followed him, shouting, screaming, and then all of us were screaming something like, "Death to the city, or, to be alive is to in pain, or, living this way fills me with dread,  or To be alive is the greatest gift of all." To be honest the words were really jumbled, and I was near the back, watching the sun splash off the calves of Ricardo who was the second one to hit the water.

The water was icily cold, and immediately our manhood abandoned us, leaving us gasping for breath as we struggled to reach the other side, which had seemed much closer when looked at from a chestnut tree in the shade.

The water was inestimably cold, but I suppose I haven't told you the strangest part. I don't know why I mentioned anything about Arturo or Jon, because they don't go by those names anymore, none of us do. When we emerged on the other side, young, and therefore we'd been told beautiful, bodies dripping water, a strange feeling came over all of us. It did not happen piece by piece. It happened in a rush, like a floodgate opening. Suddenly, just like that, our selves,s our souls were gone.

Arturo now had memories of killing many men, and a few children during a border raid in Guadelajara. Jon remembered sacrificing someone in Tenochtitlan, and being wed to a woman, giving her a necklace made entirely of gold. Me, I remembered now that I had spent the last fifteen years as a naturalist, watching birds from small hovels, frantically scribbling down the names, snowy owl, peregrine falcon, ivory billed woodpecker, of birds that I thought might one day be gone. I could go on and on.

The strange part is that we arrived on the other side of the river as new men. This was not a metaphorical journey. No. Our selves, our souls were gone, displaced by someone else. We walked around in our new and strange bodies, waiting for the tattoos that we know we'd gotten to start appearing, for the nose rings and tufts of dark hair. Two of us, it turned out, were waiting to die. Tomas said he was now a child playing on the street of Nagasaki, but he knew now, that he was going to die. He started saying goodbye to us, reminding us all how much he might have loved us if he'd had more time.

And then we, whoever we now were, turned around and looked back across the river. There he stood, stupid Andres, waiting at the edge of the water, staring at it in fear because the bastard had never learned to properly swim. And the seven of us, stood silent for a moment, contemplating him. And then, practically in unison we started to yell