I keep a picture of a girl that I briefly knew tucked into the side of a mirror in my bedroom. It was taken on the fourth of seven days that I spent with her in a small city in South Australia, kicking away time.

The picture of Sara and me in front of a waterfall has an interesting linear perspective because we’re leaning back and holding the camera close to the metal railing at an angle in order to get in the picture: the rail, our faces, the waterfall—bottom to top. My eyes squint in the picture and, when I’m older, I’ll look that way all the time. It’s something that I never like and it’s the reason that people have to tell me more than once to say “cheese” when they take my picture.

The picture records what I would otherwise have a hard time recalling.

All day, the river ran past us as we walked along it by the steadfast unmoving rocks, the water splitting against them. Carp jumped up at the chance to see us; I said, “Hello,” and threw them little torn-off pieces of bread from my pack. “I’d like it if these carp jumped up and caught the bread in mid-jump, like dogs. Wouldn’t that be nice, darling?”

“They’re not like dogs that way, honey. They have to hold their breath when they jump out of the water,” she said.

She was right. The fish would come and get the bread and it would disappear, only leaving a ripple above the waves like a transient epitaph. It was a pretty good thing to see.

The river had been there for a long time and had been steadily working its way toward the center of the Earth, down, through centuries (much more) of the rock. The thing moved like a man on his way home from work, giving the impression that it was coming back to someplace warm and hospitable where it could rest. The river was looking forward to it. You could tell.

Draped like a sheet, gum trees covered steep cliffs in every direction. If you looked up, you could see the sky doing whatever it was doing along the top of the gum tree cliffs. That day, it was showing us what blue looks like when blue maybe has its back turned and is thumbing a magazine in a local convenience store.

We had brought along a basket lunch and sat down to eat it where, if you looked directly up above the waterfall, you would see the sun. There, it looked as if the river were once flat like a board, but some deity who has since fallen out of common veneration, had cracked it with the lightning-ridge of his hand and now one part was out of line, lower than the other. The water kept going over the waterfall and on down the river, out of sight, around a gum tree bend while we stayed and ate the lunch: cheese spread on slices of bread folded over themselves. We listened to the water hum and crash like a train that’s one million miles long and to some birds singing those songs that birds like to sing.

“The fish must get one hell of a surprise when they go over that thing,” I said.

“Once they go over, they can’t go back. They must be very sad about that,” she said. You could tell that she tried to empathize with those transplanted fish, then, how she might feel the pain of her own child, so I pulled her towards me and kissed the top of her head when she put her head on my shoulder. It was all I could do.

In that sun, her hair shined at least five colors, and it was warm.

We stayed there for a very long time, maybe as long as the length of her body, while the river moved very slowly down towards the center of the Earth. We took the photo before we walked back up the river when the sun was no longer directly above that vertical line of the waterfall. The cliffs hid from us everything in the world except the sky, the gum trees, and a few jumping carp who held their breath through the air. We took the picture because we wanted that lunch next to the waterfall and the far off tiers of gum trees to last forever (a very long time). In the picture you can see a carp in the moment of waking from a dream, hanging like a ready-to-drop apple from a tree in the midair of the waterfall crossing the rift in that cracked river.

I said to her, “I’ll miss you heaps, Sara.” Without the picture, with just memory, it would probably be a lot different, there by the river and the gum trees, the carp and the smell of her sun-warmed hair. When I see the photo in the mornings, I’m glad I have it to remind me that things can be pretty great for a little while.