Danube

Through the project, I hope to pass on the key my grandfather gave me: an invitation to imagine.

The river is not blue.
The river is not nameable.
The river is the story that forgets it is a story,
and still goes on whispering beneath our sleep.

Like rivers we were told were blue,
my grandfather’s words return in dreams.
But like water, memory holds no color—
only reflection, only what we bring to it.

His words never stayed whole—
they slipped between meanings,
echoed in the silent pauses,
drowned in motion, shimmering with illusions.

Perhaps it was never about the story —
but the way it bent the frame of thought,
how the world turned sideways,
where marsh and sky exchanged names.

He once told me:
The river is not blue.
I didn’t understand—
I couldn’t.

But one day, I watched it swallow the sky,
turning

to mirror,
to glass,
to nothing.

It was never blue.
It was never even river.
It was the motion, the memory,
shaped in a color we had been taught to see.