Liora first heard the question beside a river.
They called it the River of Now.
“It is said,” a traveller told her, “that only this moment is real. The water beneath your feet—this alone exists. What has passed is gone. What is to come is not yet.”
Liora watched the current slide past the stones.
“And the rest of the river?” she asked.
The traveller shrugged.
“Memory and imagination,” they said. “Only this—” they pointed to the narrow band of water touching the shore—“is truly here.”
The idea stayed with her.
Everywhere she went, she began to notice it.
People spoke as if the world existed only at a single moving edge.
“The present moment,” they said, “is where reality happens.”
But something about it unsettled her.
If only this moment were real—
what, then, was the river she had just seen flowing before it arrived?
And what of the curve she knew it would take beyond the bend?
So she went in search of the source.
After many days, she came to a place where the river widened into a vast basin. At its centre stood a figure known as the Keeper of Moments.
They stood ankle-deep in the water, unmoving, while the river passed endlessly around them.
“You have come to understand the Now,” they said.
“Yes,” Liora replied. “I’ve been told it is the only real part of the river.”
The Keeper smiled faintly.
“Then show me where it is.”
Liora stepped into the water.
She pointed to the current touching her feet.
“Here,” she said. “This is the present.”
The Keeper nodded.
“And a moment ago?” they asked.
Liora hesitated.
“It was here,” she said, pointing slightly upstream.
“And a moment from now?”
She gestured downstream.
“There.”
The Keeper’s smile deepened.
“So which part of the river is real?”
Liora frowned.
“The part I’m in,” she said.
“And where is that?” the Keeper asked.
She opened her mouth to answer—
and stopped.
Because the water she had pointed to was already gone.
Replaced by new water, indistinguishable from the last.
She shifted her footing, trying to keep hold of the “now.”
But it would not stay.
“It keeps moving,” she said.
The Keeper shook their head.
“No,” they replied. “You are the one who moves.”
Liora stood very still.
The river continued.
Not as a series of separate slices—
but as a continuous unfolding, structured and ordered, whether or not she marked a “now” within it.
“Then what is it?” Liora asked.
“A place from which you meet it.”
The Keeper stepped out of the water and drew a circle in the sand.
“This,” they said, “is how you imagine the river.”
They marked three segments:
past, present, future.
“And this—” they tapped the centre—“you call real.”
Liora nodded.
“It feels that way.”
The Keeper erased the circle.
Then they traced a flowing line instead—unbroken, continuous.
Liora stepped back into the river.
This time, she did not try to isolate a single moment.
She felt the current as it passed—
not as a fixed slice, but as a structured movement in which she was always situated somewhere.
And the “now”—
was simply where she stood.
“So the present isn’t more real?” she asked.
The Keeper shook their head.
“It is more immediate,” they said. “Not more real.”
As she turned to leave, Liora looked once more at the river.
It no longer seemed divided.
There was no glowing edge of reality moving through time.
Only a continuous field of relations—
When she returned, the travellers asked:
“Did you find the true present?”
Liora smiled.
“I found where it comes from.”
“And?”
That evening, as she watched the light change across the water, nothing had become less real.
And the present—
had not been elevated.
It had simply been re-seen:
not as a privileged slice of being,
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