We are slow to leave the house. Slow on our bikes along the crowded, weekend river, slow until the path swings out into fields beyond the city. It is late October, a few days past the autumn peak, a few days before the clocks roll back, but the fields here are still rich green and umber, the sky a rare, ceramic blue. Crows flock and peck in fresh-plowed dirt, cackling at their luck. Above, red kites circle, wings barely moving, carried on rising columns of warmth.

It’s my first ride since the accident. I’d been going slow then too, hit a dusty curb, lost purchase on the cobbles. Now, the muscle in my left thigh tremors, a trough still carved where I landed on the bicycle’s metal frame. The mark of my own weight.

The bridge, when we reach it, looks like nothing special—just a steel crisscross of girders and beams. But then we push up to the top, and a liquid causeway unspools: over half a mile of water lifted towards the sky, surrounded and filled with the blue of it, a mirror world rippled only by the chevron wakes of boats. They might as well be ghost ships, dream ships, sailing by so slowly, almost soundlessly at the height of treetops that shatter the last of their golden crowns into the air.

This place—the sudden beauty of it—feels less like landscape and more like force or motion, pulling us into itself. We ride along the aqueduct’s edge, and everything becomes water, wind, sky. Weight dissolves with each pump of our legs, gravity displaced by a momentum of wheels, a proximity of cloud.

At the end of the path, we park our bikes and climb the stairs of a tower to watch the boats leave the water bridge and enter the river. Others already gathered there make space at the railing, all of us speaking half in, half out of our first languages. A faded placard reminds us that this bridge, this flowing link between Berlin and the Rhine, was almost left unfinished, its early construction suspended for decades until the east and west halves of this land were patched back together again.

Mere months from now, my arm will unravel without warning—a snarl of nerve fiber thrumming under the skin. My body will knit and fray, knit and fray, over and over until I grow stronger once more. Meanwhile, you will lift my bike down the stairs so I can ride, and I will do the same for you when, years later, you snag a wheel in a tramline and crack your shoulder blade. Like bends in a stream, we take turns. Each carrying what we can for the other.

Below us, boats enter the lock. Slowly, each boat sinks down and down as water pumps out, a smell of muck and weed rising up until, just when it seems that there is no more depth to contain it, the boat skims the level of the river and drifts free. All around the tower, there are sighs and shutter clicks as boat after boat glides and dwindles away. We keep watching even after they vanish, as if out of superstition, as if to make a wish. As if we are all wishing for that same permission to sink, safe in the knowledge that the current beneath will bear us up. Or else, we are wishing to somehow hold all of this, with all of its weight, even as we let it go.

At last, we climb back down and onto our bikes. Over the fields, evening unfurls a wave of rust. The crows settle among the trees, condensing into dark silhouettes. Where the path widens, we ride side by side, slow enough to take each curve in time. The world streams past, and we stream through it, tenuous and yet tethered, as spider silk tight-roped from grass blade to grass blade catches the setting sun like telephone wire, thread after thread of floating light strung along the water’s course, rivering us all the way home.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson