The bridge is a crossing seen inside out.
I realized this while driving on the bridge, one day.
While the crossing is like a place divided into two,
The bridge is the rolling carpet that connects the two.
I wonder if the places that the bridge connects are
Any different from those that the crossing divides.
I realized this while driving on the bridge, one day.

I realized, one day,
I was driving on the bridge.
I couldn’t remember where I came from.
Looking behind, I couldn’t find a beginning to the bridge
Although it must have been coming from somewhere.
Exhausted, perhaps, much like me. And my exhaustion
Was synonymous to the bridge: I didn’t know
How it began or where it’d end, if at all.
I wonder if our voyages are all loops
And we’ve been going round and round
Through the same places. Each of us.
Each one of us. Every day.
I wonder if we’re all ready to sell
A greater chunk of our memory for
A greater comfort. Voluntary forgetting, that is.

Long time back, the bridge must’ve been constructed
So that people may choose sides. Administer their belonging
To one of the options. Playfully throw stones at each other.
Get a few opponents killed. Playfully.
And then, perhaps, someday both of the sides won
Or maybe, there were no more opponents left. Or no stones
Left unturned. Unhurled at someone on the opposite sides.
And I don’t know how it all changed. But it did.
There are no sides to the bridge now.
The bridge is a voyage through itself
Going on forever. Perpetually.

And once again, I found myself thinking about
The poem of unending. The last of the poems
That goes on forever. A universal answer to
All questions raised. A quenched thirst.
I realized, one day,
I was driving on the bridge.
And the bridge shall become a poem too, someday.

I found a girl at some point of the bridge
Standing close to the railing, looking down.
And there was nothing below the bridge
At least, nothing to be seen looking down
From the bridge. Just a dense grouping of the mist.
But I knew to read the gesture of the girl
I knew, exactly what it meant.
Long before, when the bridge had been constructed
So that people may choose sides, its central point had been
Renowned for its suicidal potency. And now,
When there are no more sides,
And an infinite number of centers
The suicidal potency flows all throughout the bridge
Like an infection that had enslaved the entire body.
I found a girl at some point of the bridge
Standing close to the railing, looking down

Contemplating suicide.

Just another form of voluntary forgetting.
But I ran towards her. I held her by her hand.

“Why do you want to do this?” I asked her. She didn’t answer to me for a long, long time. And a time that seemed longer than the long time. And so I repeated – “Why do you want to do this?”

“Why do you want to save me?” she questioned back.

“A question cannot be an answer to another question.” I reiterated.

“I don’t believe in answers.” She answered indifferently and continued – “But since you’d like to know I’ll tell you why. I’m tired of this claustrophobic eternity and so I must die. I’m tired of looking for my parents who’re lost somewhere on the bridge and so I must die. I’m tired of waiting for the officials who I know shall never come to my rescue and so I must die. I must die because I’m tired of someone like you who’d want to know why I want to die before saving me. I must die because of you. I must die so that you may get to write a poem about me someday. And my suicide would infuse movement in that poem of yours. I must die so that your poem may become a poem again.”

She pushed my hand aside and jumped into the thin air. Freefall.

I realized, one day,
I was driving on the bridge.
And the bridge was my catharsis.
It was an excuse to the writer’s block. A detour.
And one day, we shall all be contemplating suicide
To save someone else’s poem.
A sense of duty to the poet of the state.

I realized, one day,
The bridge was driving through me.
It flowed through my veins.
Covered my lungs and arteries.
Connected unacquainted cells to each other.
I was a complete whole.
I was a blob of jumbled flesh.
I was all but myself.