The Lost Girl in the River

She had always been the girl who wanted everything.

Everything—not in greed, but in hunger. A hunger to live, to taste, to touch every possibility the world had tucked away in its corners. People called her a multitasker, a storm of dreams, a whirlwind of passion. And she lived up to every name they gave her.

She learnt five languages because she loved the rhythm of unfamiliar words. She played three instruments because music made her feel infinite. She danced, she painted, she wrote, she explored. She wanted to be everything at once—someone who could walk into any room and belong.

But in her tireless quest to chase a hundred skills, she forgot one small, ordinary thing.
She never learnt to swim.

It never felt important. After all, she wasn’t planning on becoming a mermaid. She laughed whenever her friends suggested learning it. “Someday,” she would say. “I’ll get to it someday.”

But someday has its own way of slipping quietly through the cracks of a busy life.

Her last trip was supposed to be a celebration—her first cruise. A gentle escape. A pause from the relentless expectations she carried like invisible luggage. She told herself she would relax, breathe, maybe even stare at the sky long enough to feel something she hadn’t felt in years: stillness.

But stillness came in a way she had never imagined.

The crash came without warning—metal groaning, wood splintering, people screaming. The water rose like a dark, swallowing mouth. Chaos slammed into her senses all at once. She struggled to stay afloat, her arms clawing at the cold water, her mind choking between disbelief and survival.

That was when she realised—
In all her years of doing everything, she never learned the one thing that could save her.

The river was unforgiving. It tossed her like she was weightless, like she was nothing but a leaf in a storm.

In her final moments, as her lungs burned and her body tired, she saw pieces of her life float through her mind like a film reel. She saw the awards she won, the projects she completed, the people she impressed. She saw the things she chased and the ones she almost caught.

And then she saw him—
Her first crush.
The boy she never confessed to because she thought she would have time.
The person she always returned to in her thoughts, even years later, like an unfinished sentence.
In love, too, she had been restless. Reckless. Full of longing but always moving too fast to stop and feel.

As the river pulled her deeper, a quiet truth settled inside her:
She had lived loudly, brilliantly, but never deeply enough to hold onto what truly mattered.

Her body was never found.

When people asked about her, her family said the same thing over and over—
“She was always busy.”

But the river knew her final confession.
The girl who wanted everything lost herself chasing too much, too quickly.
And in the water, she finally understood the one thing she never allowed herself—
To slow down long enough to love, to breathe, to live.

She wasn’t just lost in the river.
She was lost long before she ever fell into it.