The boulders jutting out of the stream are massive and smooth. I hop from one to the other, a powerful elation flowing through me with each leap, each impact. For the rest of my life I will picture jumping between rocks in a river as a physical manifestation of heaven. I cross from one platform to the other as if they were put there for me. She crosses them more carefully, as if they are delicate or dangerous. She stands on one of the rocks and looks downstream. On either side of the flowing water the trees tower above the ferns like pagan totems. Our trail continues on the other side of the stream.

“I knew I should have brought my camera,” she says.

I tell her I don’t really like cameras.

“Why not?” she asks.

I tell her I like my own eyes better.

“But a picture of something like this is so valuable,” she said. “Look how beautiful it is. Don’t you want to remember it?”

I tell her I like how fleeting human memory is, or at least my own. How sometimes I forget whole days of my life and that’s okay. Or how I only remember a song or a color and it comes up again in a dream, and I wake up with a song in my head I’m not sure I have ever heard before. I tell her how I can look into a face I know very well and suddenly see it as if it is the first time seeing it, and notice new things, like how tired or kind a person looks.

“Don’t you want to remember this place?” she asked.

I won’t remember which rock or tree is where, which shades of green are on which plants, where the water is foam and where it is clear, where the path goes or why I am on it. But I will remember how it makes me feel. I tell her not to worry. I tell her I can’t forget anything. I tell her that the colors and the emotions of this moment will change me forever, and in that way I will always remember it, in every action or thought starting now.

“So really, you never forget anything,” she said, and laughed.

The day is too beautiful to discuss the full implications of such a thing. I let her go on about what angles she would use to capture the shafts of sunlight if she had her camera. Her voice mesmerizes me. Her tongue dances and rolls around each syllable. To me they are sounds, and not words. I let them sink into me. I feel them, like I feel the cool water rushing around my bare feet, like I feel the rustling of the tree branches up above, like I feel the browns and greens and grays of the forest around me, like I feel so far away from myself when I laugh or cry. The words are as foreign a language to me as the shapes of the clouds up above.

We walk on, and reach the uninhabited cabin we had set out for. We eat our lunch on rocks in the middle of a larger, slower river. I watch the insects skate across the surface of the water in quick spasms. There are too many miracles, here in the middle of the nowhere. It can overwhelm me.

After a while we walk back across the stones to shore. She sights a bright clearing deeper in the forest, and we work our way through the undergrowth toward the glare. We are blinded as we first stride into it, then our eyes adjust and we can see the small purple flowers held on spider-leg branches and the thick grasses and the blue of the sky.

With careful and silent skill, I have crafted myself into a safe haven of anonymity for all I see. A word or a color can sink as far into me as it ever can; it will find no meaning attached to itself. Just a current, an ambience, a holy lack of justification.

The warmth of the sun is on my face. I smoke my last cigarette under the redbuds, watching the bees scour the clusters of flowers on the branches. After a while I grow tired of souring the spring wind, and I grind the embers of tobacco into the dirt with disgust. We lay out on the grass together as the bees gather nectar, and when the sun begins to sink between the folds of the Blue Ridge, we rise and walk towards home in the orange haze of afternoon.