Forlorn Bridge of Bereftness

There is a bridge I cannot give up. Each night I come back to it. My soul is condemned—or perhaps, blessed— to walk its span again and again. It is not a bridge over a river that you will find using a map. It is a bridge across a more fragile stream: the gap between the life with you that I imagined living, and the life without you that I am living. The bridge is not constructed of stone, but of silence. Its planks are carved from words I never uttered, and its cables woven from looks you never saw. And yet, beguilingly, it stands. Grief, it seems, is the most significant architecture of all.

I return here, indefinitely. There are no maps that show where it exists. It is there in the city, or the countryside, but it is not there in the map of rivers and landscapes. It is suspended in me. It is an invisible architecture made from desire, silence, and unfinished attachments. An architecture whose substance is nothing more than a sigh that died before it left my lips; words I staged but never uttered; the gentle weight of that look that fell unacknowledged. It is a bridge that extends not across water, but across the chasm where I offered my devotion, and it was met with your indifference.

And even though it wobbles under the weight of all that is not fulfilled, it does not break under that weight. Maybe grief has a stronger foundation than joy ever had. 

I walk step by step. And with every step comes a memory, though not one of what happened, but what nearly happened. I remember the conversation we didn't have, laughter hovering at the edge of reality, just short of spilling into existence once again, into the void. The warmth of your hand only outlined my hand, not making contact with mine, but setting its impression upon my skin. These are my memories: unfertilised, unexperienced, heavier than all of the days that actually passed. Nostalgia without event. Wanting without fulfillment. A past that never occurred haunts me harder than any that occurred.

I call it the bridge of bereftness because I exist on that unusual structure where love exists while ultimately finding itself with no soil to grab hold of. It is a strange place to exist, half a place of refuge, half a place of banishment. To stand there is to live in one juncture of life where fullness and emptiness coexist without exclusivity - the heart swollen with an abundance of feeling while being surrounded by an entirely barren world.

Here I have come to understand what it means to inhabit two realities at once: the inner world, glowing with the fire of love, and the outer one, where your absence quenches all sparks.

This bridge is suffocated by nostalgia. But not simply nostalgia for what was—for there was so little of you to hold to in fact. It is nostalgia for the dream, the imagined life that hung so close, and yet was never realized. I ache for the evenings which were never ours: for the things which would have been simple—a walk beside you within the glow of a streetlight, the bubbling collision of laughter at assumptions and silliness, your voice in my ear when I returned home after a long day and was exhausted. These aren’t memories but haunt me with a kind of weight as if they happened— as if the weight of their non-existence could somehow be heavier than the weight of their existence possibly could be.

I see now that absence itself has a presence — heavy, solid, without motion. I have more of a sense of your being in this absence than I do of many people I have known in flesh and name. This is the strange cruelty of unrequited love: it weaves realities out of shadows and binds the heart to phantoms with a fidelity stronger than time. I have lived more vividly in my dreams of you than in the actual days that passed me by.

What is time if not the rhythm by which we measure distances? On this bridge, time drops away. The past is no longer behind me; the past is the planks beneath my feet—the first moment I saw you, when something in me recognized something infinite in you. The future is no longer ahead; the future is the unfinished span of the bridge and holds all eternity, and offers no arrival. And the present? The present is this walking, this eternal in-between, where love lives unfulfilled, and desire breathes unconsummated, like the space between our fingers that thrills so deeply to touch.

Maybe eternity is not about heavens or hells, but is here; here one cannot arrive or go back, consigned to a sacred causality of yearning; that its absence is bigger than presence, its silence bigger than speech, its impossibility greater than any joy. For those who have loved—and have been loved back— memories eventually fade into tenderness; a tenderness that is finite. But for those of us who have loved alone, well, there can be no closure because there was never a wound, just an eternal ache—a bruise that does not go away because it never really even had contact.

And, so I often ask myself, as philosophers have often asked for centuries: what measures life? Is it the things done, or the infinite things left undone? Is it the weight of things we carry, or the weight of things left behind? Here on this bridge, I start to believe that being is less about having, and more about wanting—that to be human is not to have, but to want; not to arrive, but to walk further and further toward what cannot be reached.

You were my unreachable. And yet, because of you, I found the truth that love requires nothing to justify its existence. Pure love asks for nothing. Love is not a contract but a confession; not a transaction but a surrender. In never receiving your love, I learned that love is not diminished by silence, but made purer; love is not defaced by unrequited intention, but made admirable, tempered like gold in fire. Unrequited love becomes, in suit, the highest form of devotion—love shorn of desire, love bereft of return, love that continues simply because it cannot stop.

Yet, the ghosts of nostalgic episodes torment me. I can see us standing on this bridge side by side, pausing mid-across to look down at the river below. I can see your shoulder brushing against mine, hear your laughter breaking the silence, your company making the endless ache somehow unnecessary. I know these are inventions, yet they possess me as if they were once real. The soul seems to know nothing of memory of what was, nor the memory of what could have been. Both are burdens of equal weight, both are shapingule of equal duration, and both are wounds of equal claim.

And what is time if not the rhythm by which we measure our distances? On this bridge, time begins to dissolve. The past, if it mattered, is no longer behind me as it is the planks underfoot; the very first moment I saw you; the moment when something could recognise the infinite in you.

The future, once ahead, is now behind and boundless; like an unending span of a bridge, assuring no arrival. And, the present? This infinite walking; this eternal 'in-between' state where love exists without completion, where desire breathes without consummation. Maybe eternity exists not in heavens or in hells, but here; here where there is neither arrival nor return and where someone is condemned to a sacred and fateful repetition of yearning. 

And thus, I find myself asking, as philosophers have for thousands of years, what is the measure of a life? In the things done? in the infinite things left undone? In the weight of what you possess? The weight of what you lost? On this bridge, I want to believe that being is less about having than yearning - that being human is not about having, but desire; not about arriving, but walking forever toward an unfulfilled yearning.

Well, do you see what you made of me then? In your never responding, you have become my most never relenting mentor. You taught me that to love is not to possess but to endure. You taught me that beauty is potent not by holding it… But by it haunting you. You taught me that grief… when carried with reverence… can be a type of worship. And though you never consciously chose to stand with me beside one another… I nevertheless stand on this bridge… because I know that in losing you… I found myself... even if the only finding was saturated in tears.

Maybe this is eternity—not a reunion, not a fruitful paradise... but sacred longing repeated. Maybe heaven or hell is the same place: the bridge we are alone on... carrying with us the one who was never on it with us. And maybe the highest dignity is not to resolve... but to carry uncertainty, making our wounds a type of worship.

And yet, my heart will not be content. It still wonders what it would have been like if you had walked out on this bridge with me, if our feet would have met together in the timber, if your hand had brushed mine in happy accident—I think of us stopping halfway, looking down into the river below, and knowing from this moment onward love was no longer rupture, but home. I know they're fantasies. But they are the music that spills over, even if it reminds me of that which will not be.

So I stand--one nameless pilgrim, one prayer of absence, one acolyte at the altar of silence. The bridge of bereavement has no end. And so the walking does not stop. And while I know that you were never mine, you were the eccentric pivot around which my soul turned toward itself. For by loving you, what became unmade was myself; and by being unmade, I became the expanse of what it means to be.

Yours, now and forever,

-In ache, In awe, In absence;-

The Keeper of the Forlorn Bridge