At the River's Edge

At the corner of West Street, several roads sketch out a piece of Kashmir, within which lies an unclaimed kindergarten. Every morning, come rain or shine, it releases nursery rhymes tinged with the scent of vegetables.

On the road surface sprawls a temporary sculpture, stubbornly shaped into an arch, or more specifically, a single-sided Arc de Triomphe. When I look through it from its southwest side, I'm engulfed by a sensation reminiscent of Korea. The driver explains that every August, on days of torrential rain, this arch changes the orientation of its gaps and openings. The principle behind these changes involves simple calculations mixed with yearly reductions in carbon emissions, often fluctuating due to the presence of the river. This so-called arch often stands at the edge of the river.

In truth, I have been searching for the river for a long time. Such assertions of "in truth" and "for a long time" prop up a vast confidence, instilling a fear below a certain threshold in the speaker. Conversations that begin with such vast confidence ultimately dissipate into the air as water vapor, until they find the zones of stagnant air encircled by air-conditioned rooms, outlining them as tropics. Along the banks of the Yangtze River, such tropics often hide behind ships with a drainage capacity of five hundred tons, which international organizations had downgraded to mere boats fifteen years ago, their exploratory missions concluded. People now only collect cherry blossoms and simple lake wrappings in winter, giving some topics for festival discussions.

However, the river doesn't only reside in the tropics. To be precise, the river simply doesn't refuse the tropics. It also doesn't refuse industrial zones, fishing grounds, and shrinking food processing areas. I pass by them in the dead of night, catching fleeting glimpses when traffic halts. Such glimpses are hard to come by in everyday life, but when the microwave evenly rotates to the last second, and the router begins to reboot, seemingly successful at the start of that red light monologue, you feel these glimpses.

Near the river, such glimpses become more frequent, enough to prove that the only elevated road climbs too early and sinks under its load not so easily, causing irregular twisting, as if the bridges were staring at something. On rainy nights, when it's hard to distinguish between rain and fog, the pervasive water mingles with the loosened tiles on the ground, churning up the broken soil. Someone had verified these soils ten years ago; in fact, they belonged to a plateau. The characteristic of a plateau is to absorb, while others say its characteristic is to shear, the latter plunging one into unprecedented fear. However, when I roamed the airspace of the Andes, I saw plateaus once using CTRL and V, then the airspace expanded, crudely, with jagged clouds at its edges unsmoothed by sandpaper. The consequence of absorption is silence, not even the sound of a bike lock drifting away, leaving one in a panic of being absorbed, if it can be simply called panic.

Then the river disappears, vanishing in the ticking of a clock between lightning and thunder. Later, I took some time off, wanting to actively search for traces of the river. I asked the elderly behind diffused white walls; they said people had come to collect these ground substances for processing. The products were birds with very sharp morning cries, leaving pale trails when they flew, as if patching up the sky. I also visited those who secretly stewed soil, only to be met with awkward silence. We would sit without speaking for a long time, then offer many rushed explanations. I would ask Siri, and she would say such results were not due to the soil, perhaps just a sneaky unease.

On my way back, I caught sight of the Arc de Triomphe again, its letters becoming clear due to a slight rotation. What surprised me was not the content of the words but that the font remained unlicensed, an oversight of the plateau.

I stared at the words, and they stared back at me, until we reached a reconciliation and the fluctuation of letters stopped. People say these are all wastes, discarded in processes also caused by the river, or perhaps by bad luck and injustice.

Heading home, I tread carefully, still feeling as though I walk on the edge of the river.