That summer, we thought the river bend belonged to us.
We were loud and sunburnt, flicking sticks like swords,
dreaming of kingdoms rising from eucalyptus haze.
Until silence fell—
the kind that doesn’t come from respect, but from confusion.
Because behind the reeds, where the water slowed and deepened,
we saw the priest,
not as the man who spoke in Latin-light behind golden cloth,
but as something more human and less holy.
He wasn’t wearing vestments. Not a threadbare shadow of authority,
like faith grown thin from the sun.
The boy beside him— barefoot, hesitant—
held the offering bag like a riddle wrapped in guilt.
Coins clinked soft like secrets being handed down;
splashed on running water along with his trousers.
We didn’t know what we saw exactly.
Only that it bent the world and cracked the clean lines we’d drawn
around grown-ups and their sermons.
We giggled, then hushed.
Ran back through the brush
chased not by snakes but by knowing.
That summer, we lost something we hadn’t realized we were holding:
the blind trust that adults are always what they pretend to be.
And though we never spoke of it again—
never confessed what we’d witnessed
to our parents, our teachers, or the boy himself— it stayed.
Not like a wound,
but like an unfinished sentence that we’ve carried since into every room.
.
