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No, I don’t mind. It’s peaceful here,” Nathan said, though he was lying, because he knew he would never get used to the idea of sitting in one place, in the middle of summer, just to look at flowing water. “My ex-wife got laid off too,” he said, to make conversation. “She worked for the county. In social services.”
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How long were you married?”
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Sixteen months.”
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I was engaged,” Sofia said, keeping her eyes on the stream. Three sparrows fluttered over the water and landed nearby, and they began playing a game of hopscotch on the grass, bouncing into the stream and bouncing out. “He was a drummer,” she said. “He died four years ago this month. Of pneumonia, which is crazy.” For some reason the silence that followed was not filled with an overwhelming sense of tragedy. The sparrows disappeared and the water flowed. Sofia had been a loner before, Nathan concluded, and she would still have been following this stream, alone, even if her drummer had lived to marry her. A very faint breeze drifted over the grass and Nathan felt the glass skins of the modernist office buildings dissolving into sand in the sun.
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I just like to spend time with the water,” Sofia said. “You understand. Right?”
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What do you see?” he asked. “When you look at the stream?”
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It’s not what I see. It’s what I feel.”
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What do you feel?”
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That it’s been waiting here for me to find it.”
Nathan did not know what to say to this. He didn’t believe in fate. When he discovered cool things on his cycling explorations, he didn’t think it was his destiny to find them. But he couldn’t say any of that, and instead he felt defeated at his inability to take their conversation to a place that didn’t feel so anchorless. Her communion with the stream was making him feel anxious. He needed to keep moving, and he looked at her pleadingly, as if to say, Can’t we just keep on exploring? But she didn’t notice or care about his discomfort. Instead, she took out a book to read.
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If you want, I could read this to you,” she said. “It’s poetry. This one is called ‘The Idea of Order at Key West.’ ”
