第7章 The Paper Bridge

And Wren, writing to the west bank about the notebook of poems she had never shown anyone, wrote the first poem she had ever written for another person, a short thing about a bridge and a river and two people who had never touched, and she folded it into the letter and sealed it in the bottle and wedged it under the last dry plank, and she stood a long time at the east end of the bridge in the dark, feeling the poem go out of her chest across the water the way the letters had been going all month, and she understood that the poem was the last plank of the paper bridge, that the bridge had been waiting for a poem to finish it, that a bridge built of letters between two people who have never touched is finished only by the thing that cannot be said in prose, and that the poem was that thing. The paper bridge stood in the shallows at the bend below Cold Spring through the last warm nights of September, and Wren and Miles, who had never once touched and never once seen each other's faces clearly in the dark, learned the whole architecture of each other through the letters, the way a person learns the architecture of a house by living in it, room by room, without ever seeing the roof. She learned that he read old adventure books and kept the ones he loved on a shelf above his bed. He learned that she could name every bird on the east bank by its call. She learned that he had built a model of the iron bridge at the square out of matchsticks and kept it in a box under his bed. He learned that she wrote poems in a notebook she had never shown anyone, and that the notebook had begun the same year her mother left. The letters were the rooms, and the rooms were being furnished, and the bridge was being built out of the furniture of two lives that had never once touched, and the building was the whole of it. The letters crossed the river through the whole of September, and the bridge at the bend below Cold Spring began to change in ways neither of them could explain and both of them could feel. Planks that had been gray and rotten for years came up under their feet with a spring that had not been there before, and the ropes, which had hung slack and frayed, drew tight as if some hand were hauling them, and the water under the deck ran clearer, and the reeds on both banks grew straighter, and the whole ruin, half-sunk in the shallows, began to stand up out of the river like something being raised from a long sleep. Wren wrote to Miles about it on the fifteenth night, sitting on the dry planks at the east end with the moonlight on the water and the paper on her knee. She wrote that she had begun to think of the bridge as a paper bridge, that the letters were the paper, that the plank of each crossing was a sentence, that the sentences were the wood, that the bridge was being built out of the only material that could possibly hold two people who had never once touched, which was the paper of the letters, the ink of the handwriting, the patient repeated fact of being there on the other side. She wrote that she had stopped being afraid of the water, because the water was carrying the letters, and the letters were carrying them, and a thing that is carried is not lost. Miles read her letter at the west end of the bridge the same night, and he wrote his answer by the light of the moon and the mill across the water, and he wrote that he had felt it too, the standing up of the bridge, the drawing tight of the ropes, the clearing of the water, and that he had thought of the same word, paper, and that he had decided that a paper bridge was the only kind of bridge that could be built by people who had never touched, because paper can hold anything, because paper can cross anything, because paper has been carrying the world's messages since the world began. He wrote that he had begun to think about what would happen when the paper bridge was finished, when the last plank was in place and the last sentence was written, and that the thought made his chest feel the way the river felt, full and moving and alive. They did not meet in the middle that night. They stood at their own ends with the paper bridge between them, and they understood that the bridge was almost finished, that the paper was almost whole, that the last plank of the paper bridge would be the first time they touched, and that the touching would be the crossing, and that the crossing would be the beginning of the real bridge, the one that could not be built of paper, the one that would take the rest of their lives to build and would never be finished, and that the never being finished was the whole of the point, that a bridge built between two people is never done being built, that it is being built every day, that the building is the love and the love is the building. The river moved under the paper bridge, and the moon moved over it, and the letters kept coming, and the bridge kept standing up, and Wren and Miles, on opposite banks of the Hales, on the same night, under the same moon, understood that they had begun to build the real thing, the thing that would not be finished, the thing that would carry them for the rest of their lives, and the carrying was the crossing, and the crossing was the love, and the love was the bridge, and the bridge was paper, and the paper was the letters, and the letters were them, and they were the paper bridge, and the paper bridge was almost whole.