The water doesn’t move us anymore; we have moved into the water itself. The distinction between where I end and the river begins has dissolved, leaving only a sensation of being suspended in something cool and heavy and alive. My hands are no longer gripping oars because there are no oars left to grip—only the faint memory of wood grain against my palms.

We aren’t drifting on the surface anymore; we’ve slipped below it. Or perhaps above it. The concept of up and down feels irrelevant now, like trying to measure the weight of a shadow or the speed of silence. Around us, the darkness isn’t empty. It’s textured. I can feel the rough scrape of kelp that isn’t there, the phantom tug of a current that has nowhere to go, the subtle pressure of deep water pressing against my skin as if it were trying to remind me that I am made of air and bone, fragile things easily held up by nothing at all.

“Stop thinking,” Ember’s voice says, but she doesn’t sound like she’s speaking from a boat anymore. Her voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, resonating in the hollow spaces behind my ribs. “If you think about the water, it becomes an obstacle. If you stop trying to solve it, it becomes a home.”

I try. I really do try. I close my eyes and picture myself standing on solid ground, watching the boat glide past me, wondering why I haven’t noticed when I let go of the oars. But there is no ground. There is only this endless, breathing expanse that holds us without holding us tightly enough to trap us. It’s a terrifying freedom, the kind that makes your heart hammer against your ribs not from fear of drowning but from the sheer intensity of being allowed to exist unanchored.

Suddenly, I am writing again. Not on paper, not in my head as words forming sentences, but directly onto the water itself. My fingers leave trails of silver ink that don’t dry; they ripple and spread, turning into small fish or birds before vanishing entirely. It’s messy. The grammar is broken. The verbs are often in the wrong tense. But it feels true.

“I’m doing it again,” I whisper to the dark, realizing with a jolt that I haven’t even realized I was narrating until now. “I’m turning this moment into something I can hold.”

“You’re not holding anything,” Ember replies, and for the first time since we started drifting, she sounds like she’s right here next to me, though there is no space between us to measure. “You are just letting it happen. The fish aren’t yours. They belong to the water. The story isn’t yours. It belongs to the night.”

A wave crashes over us—not a violent one, but a gentle surge that lifts the boat, or rather, *me*, into a different layer of reality. For a second, I see the cottage from above, looking down at our little vessel like it’s a toy left on the grass. The rain is falling upward now. The stars are swimming in the sky below us. Everything has flipped upside down, yet nothing feels wrong. It just feels more honest.

“Does it feel like waking up?” I ask, watching a school of lights flash beneath me as if they’re responding to a question only I can hear. “Or is this what sleep feels like for someone who spent their whole life trying to stay awake and write the perfect story?”

Ember laughs, a sound that ripples through the water and comes back up to my ears like an echo from another lifetime. “Maybe both,” she says. “Maybe you’ve been sleeping all along, just too busy editing your dreams to notice them.”

I smile, letting go of the last fragment of control I think I have. Letting the boat—or whatever this thing is that carries us now—take over completely. The water accepts me without judgment. The silence doesn’t demand explanation. And for the first time in my life, the page is blank not because I’ve run out of things to say, but because everything I need has finally been said.