Continuum

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” -Edgar Allan Poe

I want to know where I am on that continuum, the one with life and death on either side. I imagine, in fact I know for a fact, that I'm closer to death than the majority of the people I know, but why? What parameters put me there? Realistically, those parameters are just as arbitrary and vague as the boundaries between extremes. So does that mean they matter more or not at all? These are my non-rhetorical questions of the day, although I'm not sure of whom I'm asking these things.

Grapple

I don't know what it means to be here. I know pieces of the purpose of existence. And for the duration of this post, I am choosing to be outside the context of any supernatural force, if at all possible.
Far be it from me to assume that I could ever have the mental capacity to hold the universe's ideas of my life at all. Yet we all seem to pursue those ideas, almost mindlessly. Time moves and shifts on beyond that of here and now. Even as you read these words, they are aged. My mind has certainly already changed and found some other concept of struggle to tackle.
But at one time, in one moment, these are thoughts I had: I am indeed a broken and fallen individual. I have lost the motivation for a season. I am rolling down a hill that ends in a cliff, consistently picking up speed, bumped by rocks, sticks, and branches that all try, to no avail, to slow me down. I honestly don't know know if I will stop before flying off the edge of that cliff. Or if instead, I do fly and am somehow caught by something or someone just before the fatal end. Those are simply thoughts I have right now.

The Fall of the Bridge

There is a small park close to where I lived during that summer. It's some sort of train station memorial or something. All that's there is the small memorial building, a short path, four or five benches, a couple picnic tables, a gazebo, and a bridge going over the old train tracks. The bridge is mine. I mean, not really. But it's significance to me is far greater than to anyone else. I know it. On that bridge I come to the brink of reality and life. I grapple with questions of existence and purpose and pain. One night I stood, leaning on the bridge's railing, breathing with the wind, and thinking of the fall. Not the season, but the fall from healing to broken, from wholeness to fractured. My mind can't contain the concepts, nor can my body. The whole being that is me desires to release them into the air as separated atoms that are nothing but lost particles in the moving air around me. That release is as varied as the elements of the earth.

Bridges are built to withstand great pressure and to facilitate the crossing of whoever would will the bridge to do its job. I once saw a bridge, not mine, collapse right in front of me. Simply too much pressure and the bridge failed. It fell. Cracked. Splintered. And every person on the bridge had looks of fright and confusion. Because it failed. And fell.

The fall is forever and infinite. Both separately and mutually. We are the fall. We are broken and fearful and splintered. When I stand on my bridge, I can jump and run or simply walk or stand upon it and I, naively, trust that it will manage to hold it all. But if it fell, even if it fell while I was with it, I would not condemn the failure of the bridge or its architects. I would only empathize. I am falling. So I stand on my bridge and breathe in and out as existence and failure and purpose float through my being.