By Robin J. Bartley
Content advisory: suicidal ideation
Act 1
Hello, girl of the bridge. It’s been quite some time since I’ve thought of you last. How long ago was it that I was passing your photo beside the now chained off bridgeside? Long enough for me to have forgotten what you looked like in that picture of yours. You were smiling—I think it was a class photo but I can’t be sure—and your eyes were moonkissed sunken deep. Your hair—the color of which I can’t recall, maybe it was orange or brown—was pushed behind your pale head, which weighed heavy and unsteady on your slumped shoulders.
Your name was scribbled onto the photo, I think, but I was driving too quickly to make it out. Whether it began with an M, an S, I will never know. I’m sure it was a pretty name though; someone like you isn’t too easily forgotten. To me, you’ll always be the girl that did what I cannot. I remember seeing flowers placed around your bridge, some petaled, some papercut, all about to be washed away by the coming rain. Most of the flowers were purple I think, maybe what used to be your favorite color.
Tied to one of the flower stems was a letter, I believe. A friend perhaps, a loved one or family member writing the goodbyes you’d never hear nor read. Perhaps I should write you a letter; I’m sure you haven’t gotten many recently. Beside the letter, beneath the flowers and scattered about the bridgeside were a few candles. Some were purple, I believe, some were white, but one in particular I distinctly remember being a deep crimson red. It must have been barely lit before its embers went out, much of the wax had gone unmelted by the flames’ grace before she was flickered out by the wind. Whoever put the candle there must not have stayed very long.
Sometimes you pop into my head, in and out like a ghost does in a haunted vessel, but like the photo, the flowers, the candles, the letter, you disappear too quickly. But not tonight, oddly enough. Maybe I unlocked a hidden memory within my too-old yet still young mind, or maybe it’s you calling to me from the bottom of the bridge. Maybe it’s time I meet you. Maybe it’s time I see if the mark you left on the pavement below and the bridge above matches mine. So far they seem fairly similar.
Act 2
I watch the wind flow through the wilted flower weeds, listening as car whirs echo beneath the bridge. Your photos are long gone, your candles blown out a decade ago. Yet there are still flowers blooming on your grave, vining about the chain links that bar me from you. Bound to you with weathered zip ties and string barely strong enough to hold on are blue petalled flowers illuminating the night. I guess I was wrong. Your favorite color must have been blue. The azure flowered scales of the sky write upon the fence a single letter with a comic sans. G, the flowers write. Your name must have started with G. I will probably never know you more than that, G, as every time I look you up in the memory books you’re scratched from those etchings. But I most certainly will not forget you, and leave you from mine.
I sit and wait for perhaps someone else to come and watch as your night sky drifts upon us, but after some time passes and no one joins I begin to talk to myself. My legs cross uncomfortably on the cold concrete as I make note of the few odd details about you and your bridgeside grave.
Just below your fence are paint-drawn cartoons of flowers and butterflies, each branded with your G. Amongst the wilted flowers above is a small grass statuette, twisted and weaved into a woman and her child, a Mary and her grass-bladed Jesus. I wonder which you were. Above the flowered arrangement is the blooming bud of a single rosewhite dahlia, barely holding onto the chains of your bridge. For a moment, when the wind picks up, I watch to see if it will fall, but it doesn’t. It drifts, but it doesn’t fall. The difference between a dahlia and you, I guess.
And when the moon drifts by in an hour’s time, and I’m still sitting down staring at you and talking to you, I can’t help but feel you sitting right beside me. I have to remind myself you’re gone. You’re not here. Just the flowers, the drawings, the wind, the cars. And me.
My hands at this point have taken the shape of the sidewalk. I wonder what I would have said. I wonder what I would have done. What I could have stopped you from doing, had I been there those years ago. There’s not much I can do now, for you, and for that I apologize. But there is something I can do for those who remember you, who love you even now that you’re gone, who even despite never having met you feel your pain and suffering. I can write, write this. Not for you, but for them.
Robin J Bartley is a transgender fantasy and fiction writer, born and raised in Oak Park, Chicagoland, Illinois, in the U.S., with a heavy focus on the psychological elements in both herself and her characters. She works to build intricate worlds for their readers to get lost in, and is known for crafting thematically rich stories and characters meant to display the depths of the conscious mind. With hands-on experience in the magnitude of larger projects, and an unmatched dedication to their characters and themes, she offers a limitless drive and unmatched creative passion.