Maps of Old Mexico

Water necessitates gazing.
We stand on opposite sides of the river and indulge this cliché. Can't see much of the water, a narrow thing, silvery-grey, and obscured by weeds and grasses growing from the steep embankments.
I could leap across the river and join her on the other side, or she could join me, but we let the river cut through us instead. These are countries of silence, and even when she does talk, her words will be as silence, and the spaces between those words will speak of far more than anything she says.
Behind her, a few fields back, a dark smudge of woodland is still - bony branches under leaden skies - beyond that, rainy hills, and between the bony-branched woods and the rainy hills are rumours of a dark town where she must have come from. Sloping roofs of shallow houses. A spire that might belong to a church or a factory.
She tells me that the river we stand above is nameless, though feeds, eventually, into the Noxis-Nibris. Dark hair falls across her face. She stares down at the needle-thin river. Even as she finishes speaking, I realise I cannot remember her voice, but I am right in the fact that the spaces between her words say far more than what she says. Those spaces bring up things that might be memories - or dreams - but are probably neither. They are too splintered to be called fragments, though they do resemble fragments - fragments of interiors - the wooden steps of a remote stairway, the unloved corner of a dim bulb-lit attic, the spare room of a house rented out to people who do not stay for long, and never come to this room.
I do not need to ask her, as she tells me anyway, and again I listen to the spaces between her words more than what she says.
She tells me that the Noxis-Nibris is a river that runs through the spaces that all things cast aside - the very spaces that the spaces between her words remind me of. It is not a metaphorical river, she explains (or doesn't as the case may be) but the flow of the water (or rather shadows) that flow through there can only be accessed awkwardly. This last part she chooses not to explain, and the dark spaces between her words throw no light on this. The Noxis-Nibris can be seen in maps of Old Mexico ( and she says this like it is a country itself) and then only by the light of 40 watt bulbs in windowless attics between the hours of 2:00 - 4:00am. Her words begin to echo those spaces between her words. Something coming up from those attics that that impossible rive runs underneath.
If this needle-thin river below us that flows like the depression of Sundays in autumnal days when recovering from a protracted illness does flow into the Noxis-Nibris, and must therefore be a part of that impossible river that must exist, then this place we are in must be a space cast by another thing - another place- too. She smiles at this but does not look up.
Where are we then, under this leaden sky that does not move, standing above a fragment of an impossible river, where in the distance a dark town hides behind dark woods under rainy hills? Who is the thin girl who stands staring down into the river, whose voice is forgotten but throws up spaces will be remembered (like a song you can't get rid of, like a name you can't quite recall).
She does not speak, and I cannot see her face at all now - her hair covers her face. No breeze has moved her hair to cover her face, no hands have reached up to move the hair to cover her face. She sways slightly in the no-breeze.
In this silence is, if not truth, then something that might lie beyond it all, perhaps the course of an infinite river in a country called Old Mexico.
Or the spaces that country might throw off.
She turns and walks away. Does not say anything, but whistles a tune, something bright and cheerful and terrifying, an advertising jingle, or the theme tune to a sitcom barely remembered from lost adolescent days.
I watch her walk toward the trees, across the fields, and her hands are in the pockets of her coat, and she walks in an oddly jagged fashion, as if the ground is uncertain (spongy grasses hiding muddy patches) and she is determined not to stumble.
I do not see her reach the woods, and can only imagine the rented room in that dark town she must surely return to.
As for myself, I turn back to whatever space I have come from, and to whatever fragment of a fragment awaits me when I get there.