Foss by Mathieu Parsy
The waterfall doesn’t care that you’re here.
This is the first true thing anyone has told you in years.
You drove nine hours. You ate gas station bread. You pissed behind a lava rock that had been cooling since before your civilization learned to write things down. And now you’re standing at the base of something that has been falling since the word falling was still just a sound an animal made, and it doesn’t care. It doesn’t see you. It has no eyes. It has only this — this one tremendous verb, this constant obliterating yes aimed at nothing, aimed at the rocks below which are slowly becoming sand which will slowly become something without a name yet.
You open your arms like a confession.
Your mouth fills with mist. Your mouth fills with the mountain. You swallow it. You let it rewire the thing behind your eyes that has spent thirty-odd years keeping you presentable.
Here is what the water knows that you don’t: falling is not the problem. Falling is the whole point. The problem is the part where you decided the ledge was safety. The problem is the part where you stayed.
Somewhere below your ribcage a thing you buried in your twenties lifts its head.
It smells water.
It smells the old country — not a place, a condition — the one your body still carries like a frequency, like a code you were born knowing and then spent years translating into something polite.
You growl. You actually growl. The sound surprises you both.
The waterfall keeps falling.
The waterfall will always keep falling.
You take one step closer to the edge and something in your spine — old, wet, animal — finally, finally —
unclenches.
Author's Note:
My self-care routine is walking or going for bicycle rides after work. I also enjoy birdwatching and daydreaming about Nordic landscapes. I’ve visited Iceland a couple of times, and the memories of its scenery, along with the photos I took, always bring me back in the most blissful way.
Mathieu Parsy is a Canadian writer who grew up on the French Riviera. He now lives in Toronto and works in the travel industry. His writing has appeared or is upcoming in publications such as Fractured Lit, Pithead Chapel, The Offing, and Peatsmoke. Follow him on Instagram at @mathieu_parsy.
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