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Joseph Aprile
A Cold and Icy Bridge
Winston was bundled up against the cold February night. An icy wind
blew mercilessly across the bridge over the turbulent Monongahela River. He
looked down into river, whose movement was highlighted by a full winter
moon. The roar of the current transfixed his attention. Inescapable
feelings of emptiness and longing reverberated in his brain and seemed to
resonate with the power and directness of the river.
He looked deeply into his own life. He saw little that he could
hold on to. He had no friends, not even mere acquaintances. His mother had
died many years ago. His memories of her were of a woman with an ugliness
of heart and mean spirited by temperament. She had died alone from the slow
devastating effects of alcohol. She had abused him severely as a child. He
could still remember how often he had heard her cold voice remind him that
he was always unwanted and nothing but a burden to her. She often abused
him, physically hitting him for no apparent reason.
His father was still alive, but he had neither seen him nor heard
from him in years. He was a reclusive man, who never did understand how to
care for another human being. He abandoned his son not out of hatred or
vindictiveness, but rather an inability to share.
Winston felt the mighty river pull him toward the center of its
fury. At first he wanted to resist this force, to turn it away from him.
He wanted to break free and get on with his life. He wanted to find the
inspiration to discover a new path of redemption. Most of all, he wanted to
transcend his loneliness, and find another person, to, at long last,
discover human intimacy.
In this way, standing on that bridge, he found himself at war
between two opposing forces: one that wanted him to make the plunge into
total darkness and oblivion, the other urging him to abandon his unhappiness
and find a renewed beginning. And so it was that Winston was suspended
between two entirely different realities.
Many times he decided to despair of everything and throw himself off
that bridge, but just as many times he vacillated and held himself back.
These moments, in which all reality was suspended, seemed like an eternity.
Nothing existed outside of the conflict that now raged inside his brain. He
was somehow strangely suspended between the stars above, which represented
optimism, and the turbulent river below, which promised uncompromising
darkness.
Suddenly, the spell was broken by the clamor of feet upon the wooden
planking of the bridge. The sound of footsteps reverberated against the
superstructure of the bridge. The noise seemed to bounce inside of
Winston's head. His head began to ache, and his face contorted from the
pain. As the steps came nearer, he turned his eyes towards the intruder.
The woman's figure was shrouded in a heavy raincoat. She too was occupied
with internal worries, and was distracted from the ordinary reality about
her. She momentarily glanced up from her thoughts, and was startled by the
apparition of Winston, whose eyes were alive with the fury of his inner
thoughts. She was filled with terror. She did not wish to show fear, but
she couldn't help it. She began to run away. He called after her. She
stopped momentarily. As he looked into her eyes he saw in her the epitome
of all his hopes and fleeting optimism. His life seemed to hang on that
moment. She abruptly turned her back to him and disappeared into the night.
In the early evening of the next day, the flashing lights of a
police car were bouncing off the murky waters of the river. Scuba divers
were surfacing with the drowned body of a young man.
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