She always knew the river was unjust and chaotic. The town leapt and laid across its serpentine structure, leaving each commodity on its own island.
To get groceries, she crosses a bridge.
To fill prescriptions, she crosses a bridge.
To visit home, she crosses a bridge.
And in a way the bridges could trap people; make them always worry about the next place they were supposed to be; the next task that would require finding an appropriate way across this mirror broken by wind and current.
She was young when she first stopped to look down off of one of the bridges into the water — maybe 12, or 13. The water looked surly and her reflection warped and wrapped around drift wood and the odd rock breaking the surface. She peered down and maybe could tell where her hand waved in front of her face, but she wasn’t sure.
Over the years, though, she wandered the bridges not looking for groceries, or ways home, but ways to see herself; garbled, but real and conscious in the river. And there were others, too, that she noticed peering down below, their faces gathered around hers like lily pads anchored in a moving lake. This lake was a private place of meaning and the sensation that is often fleeting to many, but translates to: this is who I am, this is what being alive is like. But this translation, even, is not quite right, because this is a moment when body and mind jump on a tandem bike to go watch a fog bank evaporate off of a long forgotten beach. This sensation of river like lake is freeing, but these bridges aren’t complete, and the view only goes on so far.
She is a glass of water too full — beautifully full — splashing onto a floor during a strange afternoon when the sun is bright, yet hard rain falls into a quiet harbor nearby; smell this perfect boarder where salt water tumbles into the air with a fresh water lover.
It is at a moment of sunset like sunrise, that she looks to a road that is as wide as the moon and as long as a summer daydream and she begins to walk.