Soliloquy of the Faltering Timber

(the bridge speaks)

I will speak, though I was never built for speech. I was raised from faltering timber, stitched together from borrowed strength and the trembling hope that I might hold long enough for someone to cross over,

for I was not crafted by master hands.

My beams were scavenged from half‑formed lessons, my stones gathered from workshop laughter that has long since fallen quiet. I was laid across a silence no cartographer dared to map— a chasm carved by absence, a river fed by unfinished stories.

The first traveller came lightly. He carried bright contraband of dreams, and I bowed beneath him— not from weight, but from reverence. He walked as though the world beneath might shatter at a whisper, and for a moment I believed I might endure.

Then came the season of merchants, a market of murmured craft set upon my trembling back. Words were traded like lanterns, sparring sold like spice, and I became a causeway of echoes between two distant shores. I was never meant to be a marketplace, but I bore it all the same.

Years passed. The second traveller arrived carrying a heavier cargo— the kind that bruises the soul long before it burdens the feet. He stepped onto me testing as it where, whether memory could bear the weight of inheritance.

I creaked. I confessed my insufficiency. I told him I was made of teetering timber, seasonal mentorship, and the faint residue of a vanished dialect. I told him I was never meant to carry two griefs.

“What do you span?” he asked. And I answered:

“I cross only the water of what‑was‑lost, the river carved by untimely silence.

I lead not to glory, nor to certainty, but to a mute shore where one traveller once stood and where you now must stand alone.”

No pilgrim rests here. No stranger lingers. I am only a bridge for two travellers and their echo— a trembling infrastructure built to hold long enough for one soul to reach another before the river takes them both.

And still I hold. Not proudly, not perfectly— but only to its

narrowest margin.

.