The rains returned without warning.
It wasn't the violent storm from before, but something gentler — persistent, steady. For three days, the sky wept slowly, as if unburdening memories it had carried too long. Kane watched from the window, arms crossed, breath misting the glass. The earth drank deeply, its thirst hidden beneath layers of cracked silence.
Something stirred in him as he watched the droplets race each other down the windowpane. Not sadness. Not peace. Something older. Something like recognition.
Water had always spoken to him. Not with words, but with its nature — the way it moved, curved, retreated, returned. How it could vanish without sound and reappear as mist. How it refused to be held, yet held everything.
On the fourth day, when the skies softened into a pale silver and the rain fell more like a whisper than a cry, Kane stepped outside. The ground was wet, but not flooded. The air smelled of earth and renewal.
He walked toward the stream at the edge of the forest, the one his grandfather used to take him to as a child — a place where stories once flowed like the water itself. He hadn't been there in years. It was as though the stream had waited for him, patient and unchanged.
When he arrived, he knelt by the bank and cupped a handful of the water. It was cold, but it didn't bite. It welcomed. He let it slip through his fingers, watching it return to the flow — seamless, without resistance.
Then the memory came.
He was seven. Crying. His small hands gripping a wooden bowl too tight. His grandfather's voice behind him, saying, "Don't worry. Water remembers where to go. Even when you drop it."
At the time, it had made no sense.
But now, Kane understood.
Memories — like water — don't disappear. They change form. They linger in the air, soak into the soil, run quietly beneath the surface. And sometimes, when the moment is right, they rise again — not to haunt, but to teach.
He picked up a smooth stone from the bank and tossed it into the stream. It skipped once, twice, then sank. The ripples moved outward in slow circles. But soon, the surface calmed, as if nothing had ever disturbed it.
And yet, the stone remained beneath.
That was how healing worked, wasn't it?
People thought healing was forgetting. But Kane now saw healing as memory reshaped. The stone didn't vanish. It found a place in the stream's body. The water didn't erase what entered it. It carried it. Adapted to it. Continued.
He thought of all the things he'd carried — confusion, grief, unanswered questions. They hadn't left him. But they were changing shape. Becoming something else. Something quieter. He could feel it in his chest — a loosening. A current.
He whispered into the air, "Let me be like water."
Not weak. Not passive. But remembering. Flowing. Able to carry what comes, and still move forward.
And for the first time, Kane felt something close to freedom.
Not the kind where all things make sense, but the kind where you trust the flow even when the path is unclear.
He sat by the stream for hours, watching the water speak in ripples. He didn't need answers. Not yet. What he needed was this: a place to listen, a place to feel, a place where memory didn't hurt — it healed.
And that night, as the stars blinked into the sky and the last drops of rain vanished from the leaves, Kane returned home lighter — not because the past was gone, but because it had finally found a place to rest within him.