On A Bridge Somewhere

about nothing

“I’ll never be the same,” I said.

She didn’t care. She couldn’t. I tried to explain--it didn’t lend itself to explanation.

“Something is wrong. I don’t know what it is. It just feels…off.”

“Everybody feels that way eventually,”

“It’s not like that. It’s not what you think. Something is really wrong. I feel displaced--from the very place I am--and I can’t be here properly. It can’t be replaced. It’s lost forever.”

“Nothing is lost forever; we can get it back.”

“We can’t. I...can’t. You don’t understand. It’s not that it’s gone now; it’s just that it was never there. It’s never been anywhere. You can’t say to me that I’ll get anything to its place again, or find a way to be on the path again, to be on the line I am supposed to be on, going somewhere, to the place I am supposed to be--I am not supposed to be anywhere--or even the place I should be.”

“It’s simple, really, we can do it.”

“You keep on about this ‘we’ stuff; it’s not like that. There is only I; there is only You. Except, not even that. What does it really even mean? Or matter…?”

“It matters to me…to us…”

“Nobody cares. I don’t even know who I is...who is that? I know there is only one you, but is there really only one me? Who else is there? How do I know that this is me? That everything is right and in its place?”

“It can be!”

“Can it? Says who? You? I just feel bogged down, babe, you don’t know--you don’t know. You’ll never know. It’s turned sour, this feeling. It’s become something else entirely, and not entirely what I expected. Or what even it expected. It went sideways; it went beside you. It went through a way that doesn’t even exist, a method that lacks a purpose, it lacks a mode.”

“What are you saying?”

“I am not the same; I’ll never be the same.”

I looked on down from the bridge, thinking of what to say.

She’s still waiting for me. 

Author's Note

for who again?