2011-03-05 Reading, Dreams Underfoot

From Charles de Lint's story, "Bridges," in the collection, "Dreams Underfoot."

She stepped outside and stopped dead in her tracks. Her earlier panic was mild in comparison to what she felt now as she stared ahead in disbelief.

Everything familiar was gone. Road, trees, hills — all gone. She wasn't in the same country anymore — wasn't in the country at all. A city like something out of an Escher painting lay spread out in front of her. Odd buildings, angles all awry, leaned against and pushed away from each other, all at the same time. Halfway up their lengths, there seemed to be a kind of vortal shift so that the top halves appeared to be reflections of the lower.

And then there were the bridges.

Everywhere she looked there were bridges. Bridges connecting the buildings, bridges connecting bridges, bridges that went nowhere, bridges that folded back on themselves so that you couldn't tell where they started or ended. Too many bridges to count.
. . .
"How can a place this weird be forgotten?" she asked.

Moira looked around at the bridges as she spoke. They were everywhere, of every size and shape and persuasion. One that looked like it belonged in a Japanese tea garden stood side by side with part of what had to be an interstate overpass, but somehow the latter didn't overshadow the former, although both their proportions were precise. She saw rope bridges, wooden bridges and old stone bridges ...

"The same way people forget their dreams," Jack replied.
. . .
"Do you live here?" she asked.

Jack shook his head. "But I'm here a lot. I deal in possibilities and that's what bridges are in a way — not so much the ones that already exist to take you from one side of something to another, but the kind we build for ourselves."

"What are you talking about?"

"Say you want to be an artist — a painter, perhaps. The bridge you build between when you don't know which end of the brush to hold to when you're doing respected work can include studying under another artist, experimenting on your own, whatever. You build the bridge and it either takes you where you want it to, or it doesn't."

"And if it doesn't?"

His teeth flashed in the moonlight. "Then you build another one and maybe another one until one of them does. ... But this," He added, "is a place of failed dreams. Where bridges that go nowhere find their end."

The story goes on, and becomes more interesting. But I began to wonder —

Every choice we make,
every step we take,
every hour we spend,
is a plank in the bridge we are building,
from the person we are,
to the person we will become.
The question is:
When we cross that bridge
and look at where we are,
will the steps we have taken —
the decisions we have made
and the hours we have spent —
have been steps on a bridge to nowhere?