Chapter 02 · 2 min 42 sec
Paper Boats on the Gutter River
The hollowness of achievement when it costs us the people we love.
Lyrics· 229 words
[Verse 1] It rained on a Tuesday, the gutters ran full We tore homework pages and folded them small Yours had a math problem, mine had a spelling test We never once asked whose boat would win
[Verse 2] Mine caught on a leaf by the Petersons' drive Yours made it all the way to the storm drain and dove We stood in the wet grass and cheered like you'd won something real Maybe we had, I still can't say what
[Chorus] Paper boats on the gutter river Going nowhere, going everywhere I've been I didn't know yet that a road could be water I didn't know a Tuesday could last this long
[Verse 3] Now I draw rivers on paper for a living Lines that go nowhere but down to a name And every gutter after a hard rain Still has your boat in it, still going down
[Chorus] Paper boats on the gutter river Going nowhere, going everywhere I've been I didn't know yet that a road could be water I didn't know a Tuesday could last this long
[Bridge] Math problem, spelling test, sunk in a storm drain That's the whole map of that afternoon No treasure, no X, just two kids in the wet grass Watching the only thing they ever set free
[Outro] Going nowhere, going everywhere I've been Still going down, down, down
Short Story
*A story for curious minds*
In a town where it rained more than it didn't, there lived two sisters who had invented a country.
It existed only during storms, when the gutters along Linden Street filled past their ankles and became, for an hour or two, a navigable river. The sisters built their fleet from whatever paper was nearest — receipts, church programs, the backs of report cards — and launched it at the top of the hill where the storm drain began its long argument with gravity.
The younger sister always wanted to follow the boats. "Let's see where they end up," she'd say, already running.
The older sister never ran. She stood at the drain and watched until the last boat dipped under the grate and was gone, and then she walked home, slow, in no hurry at all.
Years apart, after the rains had stopped mattering and the sisters had scattered to different cities the way grown siblings do, the younger one asked her, finally, why she never chased the boats like everyone else.
"Because I already knew where they were going," the older sister said. "Nowhere. That was the whole point. We weren't racing them anywhere. We were just watching something leave on its own, without us, and being glad for it."
The younger sister thought about this for a long time, because she had spent thirty years believing the game was about destinations — about whose math-test boat or whose spelling-test boat would travel farthest, win hardest, arrive somewhere worth arriving. She had carried that belief into rivers far larger than any gutter, chasing currents she couldn't see the end of, exhausting herself trying to follow.
"You make it sound like losing was the point," she said.
"Not losing. Releasing." Her sister shrugged, the way she always had, like the answer cost her nothing. "A boat doesn't need you to watch where it lands to have gone somewhere. Neither do you."
That night, in a city far from Linden Street, the younger sister stood at her own window during a hard rain and watched the gutter run full below her, fast and brown and going nowhere she could see, and for the first time in a long while, she didn't follow it. She just watched it leave, and let that be enough.
More From This Album
