The last bridge

My feet slide out from under me. I realize I have stepped on it when it is too late. A knee-jerk movement causes me to flail my arms, and I almost throw myself off balance.

In a moment, as I perform a half-hearted split on the damp planks of the small bridge, I realize I have definitely lost my sense of humor.

Brownish and slippery, it made me lose control.

The athletic gesture stops with a snatch.

Crap!

“You have to do it but don’t look at it,” I repeat to myself.

Yet the eye falls as I, with my arms outstretched, pretend to be balancing and resisting, also to the smell that comes sapping from the small canal.

Beneath me stretches a thick stripe, well smeared in the center, starting at the heel…

...as I feel the bastard’s gaze on me.

There is no such thing as living up to the illusory image we create for ourselves when we have lost our clarity.

With a free exercise in the space of creativity, I find myself crystallized in a frame: a big furry scoundrel off leash staring at an unsuspecting passerby stumbling over the now rotten flesh of a persimmon at dusk.

I feel so embarrassed!

For a moment I thought it was a whole other substance.

The dog, on the other end, got fed up and ditches me.

Who could have thought of planting persimmons on the narrow driveway leading to the cemetery?

Tauntingly, the bright orange fruit hangs aloft like tiny lanterns lighting up the way towards a destination beyond death.

I convince myself that we often, in life, stumble or fall almost every day and that is what makes us stronger. So instead of getting angry and taking it head-on, I find myself smiling, because then it would have been worse.

I heard the story somewhere, but I can’t remember where.

It was in a book or on the radio or maybe it was one of my grandmother’s stories. Yet the image is there, translucent, and it does not go away: the old woman with the bunch of chrysanthemums and the lapel of her new overcoat all caked up complaining to the guardian of ripe persimmons falling suddenly.The compassionate-looking man still does not want to retire and cannot imagine his life without his work.

“Without the cemetery, my days would be a death,” he repeats over and over again. Perhaps more to himself than to the others he has all day around him as if to convince himself that he likes what’s in the job: the chance to find himself.

Getting back on my feet almost in slow motion, perhaps taking advantage of the viscosity of the rotten pulp and dampness of the wooden planks of the bridge, I am conscious of the fact that I don’t want to dig that deep into my inner self because I have a feeling that, underneath, I would find a stranger there.

A guy with formidable quads, for sure.

Yet, now that I think back on it, I’m sure the beast was staring at me before he left, with a certain pensive quality, as if uncertain. They do this kind of thing a lot. They see right through it, that’s all.

Dogs and death.

Who knows where those creatures go when they die?

Some people think that just before the realm of the dead there is a place called ‘Rainbow Bridge.’ When an animal dies that is where it goes, they say. It is a beautiful place where the grass is always fresh and fragrant, the streams flow gurgling like a lullaby, and it is there that it waits for its human companion by staying on the other side.

This slimy bridge has nothing heavenly about it, nor are the waters of the stream below fragrant. Was I really in danger of slipping? Did I really have the gaze of a flea-bitten half-breed on me?

Then comes the memory.

I remember that it always does at this point.

It doesn’t hurt, it comes slowly that I almost don’t notice except when my consciousness finds my soul. The old woman with the chrysanthemums is not lamenting the fall of the persimmons, but mine. It was not even a lament but a plea to the keeper, who did not move a finger.

I fell and that didn’t make me stronger, it killed me.

There is an old Japanese saying that has inspired me all my life that goes, “Fall seven times, get up eight!” I had never counted my falls; I always got back up.

Now, that I am a shadow of myself, I understand only at this moment the meaning of full acceptance. Maybe I fell the eighth time and it’s okay to stay down.

Like the man with the compassionate look and the callous soul, I find myself again in the cemetery.

“Without the bridge, my days would be a death,” I have repeated myself too many times in a distorted echo.

I should make up my mind to cross this little bridge and stop staying in a place that no longer belongs to me, repeating the same things over and over again. The half-breed has returned and greets me. His muzzle slightly lowered, his ears folding back to uncover the auricle, his eyes half-closed in a sweet expression as his lips curve into what, for all intents and purposes, looks like a smile.

In the quiet of the cemetery, among the crumbling gravestones and winding paths, the voices of those who have not left whisper in the damp air a secret that, nevertheless, everyone seems to know.

The dogs can see well. I haven’t figured out how they do it but they really can see us.

This one I have never seen and he is not waiting for me on the other side of the rainbow bridge, he is just helping me. He is still on the other side.

I don’t inhale deeply because now I know what I am.

I also smile as I leave everything behind.