She Who Lives by the River

By Zisheng Zhuang

Posted on October 4, 2026

Cover Image Title: Lonely Noon

Cover Image by: Nathan Savone

Classification: Photography

Specifications: Resized from 4032 x 3024 pixels

Year: 2026

She lives by the river, I see her every day.

She is always there, whether the undarkened sun shines, or the clouds fill the vast sky.

She greets the ever-clear river, with the comfort of a thousand memories.

The river carries fragments she left, from time ago, 

Yet the current flows just too fast for her to grasp and retrieve them.

She who sits below the old willow tree stares intently at the water, yet sees only rocks resting quietly at the bottom.

The warm comfort of her clearest river masks her own reflection, hiding it in a place far downstream. 

For her, a man came only today. He told her of adventures, of a brave young woman who traveled the highest mountains and the lowest valleys, searching for a river so clear it could wash away any sorrow.

A river that could smooth the sharpest stones, and tame the wildest beast.

And so, he came again, every day for a hundred days. Ninety-nine old introductions, and a story told a hundredfold.

Yet, the woman who lived by the river listened quietly every time. 

She smiled blankly, for the stranger spoke with a wistful notion, a yearning of something gone forever.

Today, the man did not come. I came out from behind the large boulder, where I had kept watch for a hundred times. 

“Why didn’t that man come today?” I had asked.

She only stared into the water, the question seemingly inaudible to her.

 After a while, she looked away from the water, and whispered to me.

“I remember him, he had-” Abruptly, she paused. She slowly returned to staring at the water.

I waited and waited, but she didn't continue on. It was when I had left, and the sun had started to fall beneath the grass, it was after then, and only after, that one sentence remained, for just a second. 

“She was me, wasn’t she?”

And so, the woman smiled contentedly, returning to stare at the river of her memories forevermore,  the water still far too clear to return her reflection.

Description: 

A poem about those who suffer from dementia, and the memories washed away that never return. Inside, a river symbolizes the “current” of dementia that takes the fragments stuck in the brain of a dementia patient, hiding them in a place too far away.

[ Writing Editor: Anonymous. ]