The Weight of the Ripple

There was a wooden dock at the edge of the lake where my father used to stand, his hand resting on the small of my back to steady me against the wind. He is gone now, and the dock has long since rotted into the silt, leaving only the memory of the way the water looked when he tossed a pebble into the dark center. We spend our lives trying to disturb the surface, to prove we were here by the ripples we leave behind. We throw stones, we shout into canyons, we leave footprints in the cooling sand, all in a desperate, quiet attempt to mark the void. But the water always smooths over. The surface heals itself with a terrifying, beautiful indifference. We are not the stone, and we are not the ripple; we are the brief, shivering tension between the two. If we stop throwing, does the water remember the weight of our hands? Or is the silence that follows the only thing that was ever truly ours to keep?