The river reminds you of the good parts of home: easing your body into the water, feeling the slip of moss-rocks against the soles of your feet. You notice the temperature shock has kept you from breathing, and take a small gasp. The air tastes clean, keenly wild, and you forget you were ever sweat-slick and dizzy from the heat. The chatter of birdsong comes into focus when you shut your eyes. You dip your head under, quickly, and surface with wet hair and a baptized feeling. You turn in lazy pirouettes. The sun is setting above you, casting a thick golden light and a cold that deepens by the minute. Your friends are beautiful, but in this river, in this fading light, they are especially so.
She is serenely submerged, visible only from the neck up, flaxen wispy curls and ruddy cheeks floating above the surface. She is tranquil, cherubic. She murmurs one of her endless questions, and when you finally land on the solution, she opens her clear cold eyes and cracks a dazzling open-mouthed smile, delighted. Giving the right answer and making her grin feels like winning a game show.
He shifts nervously in the chill water, waiting to be touched by a fish or a snake or perhaps a suspicious looking stick. His face is caught in its vulnerable expression again (one of vague concern, all prey animal despite his bluster and size) and gap teeth are just barely visible through parted lips. He reaches his big wet hands up to delicately adjust his glasses, fix his dark hair, and when he raises his face to the sky, the light catches in his eyes and turns them the same warm honey-brown of your own.
They were both immediately familiar. In them, you see the echoes of people you have loved: big vibrant people, people of extremes, soft and tender and sweet and tough and crass and sturdy all at once, filled with strange knowledge and easy laughter and gently buried sorrow and a particular manner of complimenting and insulting at the same time in just the right way, so that you feel truly seen and understood.
Not once with either of them have you felt that painful twinge of un-belonging that has coloured so many of your interactions; the heavy unspoken request that you please leave as soon as possible. For this, you are so grateful you follow the pair around like a battered dog. You see it in yourself, the plaintive look in your face and the tense meek way your body moves, and you hate it as much as you pity it, but there is nothing you can do to change it. Give the dog a scrap of food, a shred of attention, and he will follow you until his legs stop working. Collect the beaten-down girl from the airport, give her a polyester blouse from the thrift store, and in exchange she will give you a piece of herself.
Sometimes it seems the good times will always remind you of the bad. Having will always remind you of wanting.
Later, on the damp layers of blankets that soften the floor of their tent, while she is stroking your hair and he is holding your hand, she will tell you that some people just need a little tenderness.