The river doesn't care if you're ready. Mid-life catches you like an undertow, drags you into waters too deep for standing. One day you're wading through the shallows of your thirties, next you're navigating currents that smell of mortality.
I learn to row against time's flow. Each stroke measures distance: from youth to whatever comes after, from mother to crone, from certainty to questions. The oars feel heavy as regret in my hands. My arms remember other weights—a baby, groceries, ambitions I set down somewhere along the shore.
The ferryman never mentioned how the river changes. Sometimes it runs thick as honey, gluing the oars to yesterday. Other times it moves too fast, tomorrow's rapids threatening to swamp the boat. The water tastes of endings: bitter herbs, forgotten promises, doors closing quietly in the night.
But here's what they don't tell you about the Styx: it flows both ways. In the heart of the current, where the water runs deepest, you can catch glimpses of what's coming through the ripples of what's been. Youth and age swap faces in the swirls. The dead wave from the banks like old friends, while the living fade like ghosts.
I'm learning the river's moods. How to read its surface for what lies beneath. When to fight the current, when to let it take me. My boat leaves no wake—this journey erases itself as it happens. But my arms grow stronger with each stroke, my eyes sharpen in the twilight between states.
Some nights, I swear I can see the other shore. It glimmers like a memory of the future, bright with all the lives I haven't lived yet. The ferryman nods as I pass, recognizing fellow travellers on these waters. We're all learning to navigate this river, stroke by careful stroke, between what we've lost and what we might still find.
Louise Worthington is a Pushcart Prize Nominee whose work can be found in Reflex Fiction, Storgy and Boston Literary Magazine, among others. Her publications include “Life Lines,” a poetry volume, “Stained Glass Lives,” and the novel Distorted Days described by Kirkus Review as "a formidable work that defies narrative orthodoxy."