The Singing River Goddess
I woke on a moving train, though it was unclear whether I had boarded or simply awakened there. The rhythm beneath me was metallic and alive. The carriage swayed through mist, and across from me sat the singer, half-asleep, her hair in wild disarray, a half-smile still clinging to her lips as if she were dreaming herself.
She had an agent, somewhere in the next car, always whispering into a phone, trying to keep her on schedule and her legend from swallowing her whole. It seemed that I was meant to watch over her. Protector, admirer, shadow - none of those words were quite right, but it seemed that I was something like all three. She enthralled me.
Outside the window, stations blurred past. People stood waiting for her, each holding out something - a contract, a rose, a knife - it was hard to tell in the misty atmosphere. She laughed softly in her sleep, murmuring about the thrill of danger, how she liked the dark parts of life best. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to live inside her own mythology, but the train only answered in thunder.
Then the dream changed: the train became a large sleek boat cutting through a raging river under a bruised sky. The same people followed in smaller boats, their engines whining. The agent shouted orders from the bridge, but she only leaned over the stern, her hair whipping in the salt wind, singing to the waves like she was daring them to take her.
I thought I was no one - just a passerby on the edge of her story. She was the deva, the untamable one, born of stage lights and appetite. Every gesture she made carried the weight of music, as though the world itself had tuned itself to her pulse. I remember thinking that I was out of my element, a pedestrian swept into a myth that did not belong to me.
The boat was not small; it had corridors and chambers, polished railings, mirrors that trembled with our reflections. Outside, the river raged like an artery through the dark body of the world. Inside, everything gleamed with feverish life.
She clung to me from behind, her arms draped over my shoulders and around my neck, her laughter flickering like lightning against my ears. Though she was scantly clothed, her butt cheeks were exposed, and someone was slapping them like a drum. I felt her laughter against my skin - wild, unabashed, divine - and I realized I had mistaken my adulation as understanding. I understood nothing.
The atmosphere was both sacred and perilous, like standing too near a god. Others moved around us in a slow procession - attendants or devotees, perhaps - enacting gestures that blurred the boundaries between ritual and desire. It was all one current: erotic, luminous, and ungovernable.
I was not her lover. I was not her protector. I was the one who stumbled into her orbit, a pedestrian carried downstream. Yet for a moment I could feel the river through her touch - the weightless surrender of the world to its own momentum.
Then, the dream shifted, I saw another form of her, across the world, in a tropical open-air market where fruits and vegetables gleamed under a mountain canopy. The air smelled of sap and rain and herbs. She moved among mountains and vast fig trees, surrounded by colors too rich to describe. Mangoes split open like suns, papayas bled gold, and the people there bowed slightly as she passed, unaware of why. The agent followed her through the stalls, voice tight with business, like a clerk attending a goddess but she was radiant, untethered, stopping to taste everything - mango, lychee, starfruit – as if each bite was a gracious recognition and approval of those who served her.
I watched from a distance again, the fruits, fragments of being, reflections of desires ruled by hunger, sated with song. She existed wherever the world’s hunger for beauty overflowed its banks. I knew I had seen the soul of longing itself, wrapped in human form, vanishing down the current of her own singing.
The dream then took me back to the highlands, where mist wound itself around the pines like smoke from an unseen offering. The river that had once carried her song now ran far below, threading through gorges like a vein of living silver.
I was aboard a train that wound through these mountains, its carriages swaying as though caught in the rhythm of a vast, unseen dance. Inside was a party - if that word can contain such delirium. Lights flashed in time with a drumbeat, musicians played fragments of melodies that melted into laughter. The floor trembled. Glasses clinked. The air smelled of wine, cardamom, and rain-soaked fabric.
I didn’t know where the train was going accelerating through tunnels and over narrow bridges that spanned ravines deep enough to swallow dreams whole.
And there she was again.
She moved through the crowded passages like a singer taking the world stage. Wherever she passed, the light bent toward her. The people around her cheered, some, overwhelmed, wept.
Outside, the train curved along a ledge of impossible height. Below, waterfalls cascaded from the clouds, vanishing into green valleys. I could feel the whole mountain tremble, remembering the river that once carved its heart.
Inside, the rhythm grew wild. People danced in the narrow aisles, their shadows flickering on the walls like the ghosts of past celebrations. The windows rattled. The tunnel walls glowed. Her song was echo carried into the mountains, transformed into fire and longing.