He opened his eyes and they looked out at the nighttime darkness of a cozy room, but he didn’t even see that.
The image before him was that of a bridge.
The most beautiful, unrealistic bridge he’d ever seen.
A fairy bridge. Made of lights, colors, and threads.
And he had seen it before.
He had run from it before.
That night…
He steadied himself in his mind. No more running.
Besides, what was frightening about a bridge? Even an unworldly one? Even one created by fairies and woven by spiders with spider-thread? Ones that caught the silver-and-gold light and turned it to dancing rainbows of dancing color?
He looked the bridge over carefully, in his mind.
He had seen pictures of bridges built that way, he knew with certainty. Huge steel behemoths, towering over waters, the bridging held up by what looked to be fine dainty fibers but were actually metallic cables somehow spun together to bear great weight, but with flexibility.
He thought maybe he had actually seen one, without the colors and the soft focus. Real ones. Or maybe only one.
But where? He’d had to travel, at times, but those times he tried to keep few and far between, and also short. He had never liked being away from home for long, even before he had married and started with the children.
Home was everything, and the best part of traveling for his work was when he could return home, whether as a success or a failure. It all worked out.
It always worked out.
After he got home.
It didn’t really matter where he had seen such a bridge (New York, maybe?), he just knew that he had.
There was some comfort to be found that an actual bridge designer, working with real and modern materials, had seen such a bridge and figured out how to build one. He’d made it real.
It was a real thing, in the world.
Not, he reminded himself, made of cobwebs and moonbeams, but still real. The cobwebs and moonbeams were for the future. Something for the young to aspire to.
The thing about the bridge – he studied the mental image once more. The bridge didn’t end. It arced, and it faded into the distance, the bridge lights mingling with the stars. The bridge wasn’t swallowed by fog, or obscured by scenery. It was there, and you looked as far as you could see, and it was still there, and then there was a point where you could no longer separate it from its background. The words ‘blur’ and ‘fade’ were inadequate to this great light-based phenomena, but they were the best he had.
The important thing about the bridge wasn’t its style or even its existence.
The important thing about the bridge was its load.
