Floating across a river of blood in a pool of massacred dreams, ripples of hope. The water runs red because of the plague, to remind of the good and warn of the bad. Undesirable outcomes of the ways we've been behaving. I wanted to take a dip in that forbidden stream before all this happened. To watch it run clear and catch flickers of light across it's ebbs and flows, like someone had sprinkled glitter into it. I wanted the beauty, even though I didn't know how to swim. Never had I been within something so natural and crisp. I was willing to drown if it could wash over me, and make me feel as connected as it seemed to everything around it. How could this be considered erroneous? It seemed peaceful... Until lives were slaugtered on its banks. Others who felt the same, our kindered hearts, we wept into the deep opaque water. Water none of us knew existed until we saw it. This same small creek, that I had never been emerged in, was now a scarlet current infused with tears. Ripples from the sobbing rain are what remind us, that it is an ever moving entity, with a mind and a song, and will filter itself someday, with a slow, harmonious bubbling of purification. I can wait, and let time heal my subtle rejection, because now I know what I want. I want to swim in this elixir of life.