My gnarled circadian rhythm was one law that I could not break, and though I bent it to extremes, it faithfully led me back to the bridge, time and again. Every trip home, I stumbled through nervous fear that someone may have found my place—and spoiled it: the only place I trusted, the shadow of an overpass, I left; I worried that some other would somehow take it from me. That’s when I stole a pencil. in conversation, after a while. May be that I wrote to ease the pain, or to accentuate it. I knew a small part of me was leaving notes behind, from that hole in which I slumbered, as a means of claiming the spot as my own. But most probably, I was leaving words to that bridge because it had taken me. It had taken me in when no one else cared to, and I wanted to give it something back. That gift was little more than my everything. Not including my backpack. I wrote automatically and in a cipher that only I can read (and, I assumed, the why I had asked if I could stay a spell. I asked the bridge who else had been there and why that dog slept with me sometimes. I recounted times in my life that I could barely connect to the present, and I combed through them meticulously, clarifying the path that had led me there. Most of these tales revolved around my college, a school about which that bridge now knows many things. I told the bridge about the future, about where I’d be going one day; I mocked society. I laughed at myself. And the bridge, it stuck around. I still see it sometimes. The day I did leave, it was simply time to go. Strange as it may seem, I felt a little remorse to leave that place—my most dangerous of safe places that I or two down there.
14
Volume 15 • 2020