It was a bitter relief. Now I could get on with it, move downriver, and never have to think about it again, but if that was the case, why did I feel a plaguing regret and a vague sense of possibilities unfulfilled? How were you supposed to know when to let go and when to hang on? When to let the river take you downstream toward something new and when to double back? I turned in early that night, exhausted, defeated, and confused.

Son of Lava rumbled outside my tent door. I listened carefully for a long time to its ebb and flow as waves built and curled and crashed down again; currents swirled, clashed, and mingled, and the water relentlessly churned and pounded over rocks. Everything, I thought, had a subtext, a language hidden beneath. I tried to understand what the river was saying, but was I wise enough to decipher it?

I had believed, perhaps naively, that if you committed to something, if you trained hard enough, if you believed strongly enough, the barriers would open up before you like floodgates and you’d be treated to a glorious and well-earned storybook ending. Even through all the struggle and anxiety, the bleeding and shortfalls, I had secretly and stubbornly clung to this premise. Yet it hadn’t ended that way, far from it. I had dreamed I would emerge changed in some way, strengthened by the journey. I’d wanted to flourish in the river, like Harlan; it had become a part of his mind and soul. Yet I still felt separated, like I was navigating in an alien landscape.

I had swum through Lava, blind, frantic, bathed in fear, and emerged on the other end like a drowned rat. What did you learn from that, except that life was to be endured, to be survived?

“Don’t let that be the culmination!” I spoke aloud to my empty tent.

As I continued to toss and turn, the river seemed so loud, I could barely hear the group still reveling outside. Their voices were muted, droning into the night. The river, I thought, represented those massive forces bigger than me, bigger than all of us: that crushing diagnosis that radically altered the course of your life, the catastrophic event that changed the course of history, the adversity that knocked you down and defied you to get up again. Blindness was one of them. There was absolutely nothing I could have done in the face of it. Death was another. But misery, depression, disillusionment, alienation, fear: They were all second cousins. They rushed forward, splintering, pulverizing, disintegrating everything in their path, and we pretended we could somehow affect that unyielding trajectory.