Bridge

Warm from the early summer sun, the worn planks and wooden trusses smelled like they were freshly hewn. This bridge—a place of history, love, and turmoil—was a welcome sight., a train rumbled in the distance, although the crops were recently planted and three months from harvest. Peri wondered what it would really take to hop a train and then mentally catalogued the contents of her trunk. She longed to be set adrift on the Midwestern plains; afloat among the cornstalks; a sea of small towns and no-name country lanes; prairie grass undulating in the wind.

She needed a moment of clarity. Life had become and endless shell game with happiness always hiding beneath a different shell.

Not a gambler by any means, Peri had bet on love—went all in and went bust, yet again. This time, however, she was unsure if the taste of victory would ever be sweet as acid crept up the back of her throat.

Peri lived in each moment of her life, yet her fascination with the past was what killed so many of her relationships. She wanted to tear out all the illogical parts of her psyche that were jealous of something that was over and someone, literally, on the other side of the world.

Salty grief escaped as tears hit the lumber beneath her heels. She needed to cry, she wanted to cry. Peri shook with racking sobs, and the quiet country air was filled with her wretched wailing. Her stomach finally loosened and she vomited into the Skunk River. Her knees crumpled, she grasped at the guardrail, and splinters skewered her legs through her pantyhose as her suit skirt slid up.

She wiped her mouth with a shirt sleeve pressed for work, stood, and stumbled back to her idling car. She wasn't sure if she was walking toward him or away, but at least she was walking again.

It was one of those moments when she was capable of the most impulsive, reckless deeds. Peri wanted bottles and gallons of cheap wine. She wanted to peel off her skin and become someone new. She wanted to run away or get fucked up. Anything. She'd do anything to forget what she'd seen. She'd trade sanity just for a moment without those images in her head, playing like a drive-in movie on the backs of her corneas.

Peri thought back to her late adolescence when she'd run an iron across her pale, pink, Irish flesh just to feel something other than the overwhelming disappointment she now expected from life.

The past was past. She could either move forward with first man she'd loved in ten years, or she could let a mistake end it all and turn her inside out.