Bridge

 

The tablecloth was starched and pure white, but the mahogany bled night. It captured the twin flames of the candles twice over, but it never knew the warmth of an elbow resting too long or the heat of a real fight. It was always your favorite piece.

You were across from me, and you'd be talking about all the measurements that we'd lost 'til it felt numb. I kept watching your hands. Not your face, just those incredible hands, how they could fold a napkin into something hard as stone. The precision they used to execute a whole life, which I thought for years was love. Yet, those were the hands that held my winter like a coin you never meant to spend. But what did we cross? I still don't know.

You're gone now, packed away with the meticulous order you applied to everything. You didn't warm me; you merely measured the temperature. We didn't try to find a lasting faith, but we built a bridge of flawless wood over ground where no river flowed. We walked on air because the motion felt real, and the emptiness was too much to reveal. Oh, It was magnificent, though. Now, in the silence that felt heavy enough to shatter the wine glasses, I hear nothing but the light making no sound between the arches.

You learned to cross the distance with a careful step; I learned to trace the contours of the things you discarded. The conversations had long ago died politely, like bundled dried flowers holding their last breath. While you calculated the costs and timed the hours, I finally saw the pale outline of our end. You called it 'stable.' But, baby, stability is nothing without the twine that binds us together with all our knots and frayed edges. And the beautiful structure was already dead.

I'm standing amidst the ruins of everything we were. It's the most orderly catastrophe I've ever known. The only artifacts you bequeathed me were the leather map and the stack of unopened letters—tied with the same string you used for your tax receipts. They are stiff with the weight of the honest truth we locked away inside the drawers. All those could-have-beens and ifs are the things that couldn't fit into the blueprint anymore. My hands are less steady than yours. I almost smoothed one out, but I won't. To read them would be to pick up the tools again. And I’m done with the scaffolding.

That's the perfect summation of you: you kept the perfect lines but burned the road that might have led us home. It was safer to exist in the planning, never in the cause.

Now, I look out at the skyline where the sun descends, stretching the shadows between the houses, lengthening them like the lie of our last plan. If love was supposed to be the current that carries us, then why did we spend all our time bracing ourselves, only learning how to stand alone?

I’m taking down the timbers, dismantling this hollow ground, and letting the cool daylight find the space where we used to hang. The floor is covered in the fine gray dust of what we mistook for fire.