"I just... I just fucking wonder, you know." A sigh which sounds weightier than it probably is. Probably just a light breeze passing by and needing some thoughts to accompany it. The usual kids clatter out on the street, one of them called Sven, two of them called Issa, though for different reasons and by different parents. The others also have names, but attention hadn't yet turbulenced upon them mid-flitter-by. "Well... Don't we all? D'Ya want some tea?" Kettle already hissing but they're just asking for the question’s sake. D'Ya. Smirk based flavor profile, the way their tongue maneuvers it. Very floral with all the rest taking a backseat. "Nah, I'm good, I think" "K. But-" "Like, why is it there?" Arms fully outstretched gesturing in a sudden burst of energy. "Loaded question" "Who built it?" Habitual walk-back to accommodate a conversational quirk. Successfully it seems, as their roommate is now willing to respond. "Jelena construction, on behalf of the city council. They in turn on behalf traffic-stuck citizens one would imagine" "Okay, When?" "When we weren't looking?" The one who says it is enjoying this answer far more than the one who's thinking about the bridge again, but it's no crime indulging once in a while. It always comes aback and forth. "Okay, but do you actually not know?" They ask skeptically while slowly getting up to walk some circles. "1998, summer." Tounge click. The children outside don't mind. "Figures." "Facts even" "And you know this why exactly?" "Same reason why you're just fucking wondering, I guess. It's a big ass bridge which just sort of ends halfway and which I can see every day from this very window. Curiosity." No one says something stupid like "immanently meaningful", but only because the architecture says it for them, and their failure to respond has been the punchline to multiple breakfast conversations already. "Sure. I mean you can list more answers to searchable questions if you want to-" "Oh I'm out, 'xept some more half-forgotten trivia about Jelena" "Huh." "Disappointed?" "Not really, just surprised, but I guess it makes sense: that no one'd be fucked to write too much shit down about abandoned stylistically boring bridges." "T’was on an album cover once." "Any good?" "Noupe" "Uhh send it to me anyway if you find it again. But you get what I mean, right? Beyond the brick and mortar. Why is it like this?" "That a very-" "Locked and." "Okay, then I'm not gonna call it that, but it's still a deeply forest-missing-itself-for-the-very-concept-of-obfuscation-type question" "I know. Wanna go it word by word? "Why" "is" "it" "like" "this"?" They take the teabag out, even though it's a bit early, because they know it’d otherwise be forgotten. "Sure. "Why". The big W" "Ah yes, my favorite quirk of fake orthography" "Well, I was just going for a Bush joke. Like not any particular one. The concept. Fake orthography?" ""Y", the big "w"" "Oh." "Motion to pretend like we forgot you just called a question-word "the big w" despite them almost all starting identically" Motion approved with a bored handwave "So, you want to go it causally or teleologically?" "See I want to say teleologically, because that'd move us away from the pointless facts, but then one of us would inevitably bring up that the bridge might exist so we can have this conversation, at which point I will have no choice but to physically vomit, no matter which of us succame to temptation." "Succame?" "I'm almost certain that's a viable past tense" It’s not, or at least not depending on who’s definition of "viable" one adheres to. Not that it matters, as neither of them ever succame to prescriptivism. Issa isn’t a valid abbreviation of Isabelle either, and yet it’s how one of the two girls got her moniker. The other is named for the mythological nymph Issa of Lesbos, or perhaps for the town, which is in turn named for the nymph. Not even the parents can say for sure which it originally was, just that they like the sound of it. Issa good succession of syllables. Slips off the tongue. Sven, for his part, is named after a friend of his father, who happens to have worked on the half-finished bridge and who happens to have been to the ruins of Issa once. "Huh." "But yeah even though the bullshit meta-line has been contracepted, I think we can blitz through causal reason pretty quickly: There's a half finished bridge, because finishing it would have been additional work, and the cost-benefits-analysis on the thing flipped somewhere mid construction. Either because the cost went up or the relative benefit down. Cost up in this case." "And CB-calc is relevant because the cluster of things that is people is both responsible for inducing events at the anthropological scale and prone to slotting CB-calc into their decision making. People exist because yada yada." "Yes" "Teleologically, any random event which its existence has enabled could be the point, but since I don't know who the universe thinks it is, maybe we need to scale it to human parameters. Like "whose end would it serve, if it serves any?"" "Today on "other ways of saying "who cares""" The bridge likes to imagine that a few people do. The daily double-taking passersby, the teenagers who do cannonballs from it in the summer, the teenagers who deal drugs beneath it, the vagrants whom it occasionally shelters from the elements, just as much as the old woman who sits down at its farthest point twice a month and paints the other shore, each version growing a bit more experimentally surrealist. The breeze might also care as it whistles by, though it’s difficult to tell with breezes. "Yeah. Does it spark joy?" "Not exactly." "Really?!" "No, like, I like it. Obviously not practically, but aesthetically. A lot even. Top three inanimate objects I have seen probably, in those contexts where it's supposed to be stunning..." "...Just..?" "Conventionally beautiful things just are pretty, like independently, right? They can be enhanced or detracted from, but their average appeal is someplace above standard." "Mhm" "But that's not true here. When the sun's setting and the mood's good, it's a goddamn work of art worthy of being put on an album cover, and when it's downpour with a side of dead-shoreline-reek then it looks like the literal mass of concrete garbage it is. Still a different sort of album cover, I guess. Just kind of goes along with what the rest of reality is doing at any given point. Respectable, sure, but-" "So what you're saying is that it's symbolically meaningless." "No, I'm saying it's *profoundly* symbolically meaningless. The fact of its semiotic indistinction itself being somehow greatly resonant for some reason. It doesn’t spark joy, but it sparks something. Sparks it hard." "That's dangerously close to saying the bridge is here for us to talk about." "Fair, so "is"" "Isss." "Isssss." "Isssit?" "Existentially speaking?" "Sure" "Seems to be" "Is it all the things we claim it to be too?" "I hope so. Do you intend to claim false things?" "Not today" "Then that was pretty painless" Motion to lie tabled. They'll likely warn each other before they do it anyway. It all comes aback and forth with the breeze and whatnot. D'Ya. D'Ya ever. "D’ya ever get the ball back" , Issa to Issa, the response isn't heard. "You expect more out of it?" ""It"?" "Yes." "You tell me." "I think that's another bit of shrubbery." They contemplate leaning against the sun-warmed wood of the door. "When we ask "why is it like this" then on a surface level "it" is just bridge-stand-in, but really you're already talking about the whole situation: the one in which you are looking at the bridge and seeing some issue with that." "How broad do you want it?" "More specific than the whole-ass human condition and less specific than the single-ass bridge" "Well personally I'd almost go full self-object with that phrasing . "Why is it like this" as "why is my mental process in such a way that this is relevant"" "And why is it?" "Probably the whole-ass human condition, but ask my therapist for specifics" "I tried, but even after a solid few cocktails they won't break their precious douctoah peychinttt confienita- confffffidentiaal- den-tuality." "To avoid the unpleasant mouth sounds problem, try to pray secrets from my SLP instead" "You don't have an SLP... Do you?" "I also don't have a therapist..." "Disagree" "In that case I must wonder why you're trying to get confidential info from yourself through cocktails" "Aren't we all?" "Stop. "Like"" "I dunno. Fucking "resembling"" "Resembling what?" ""That"" "Which is?" "A pointlessly meaningful seeming bridge" "It does seem to resemble one of those, but I thought we settled on internal-it, not bridge-it." "Still, same. Why is "it" [my thinking about the thing] like "that" [a vaguely meaningful seeming bridge that just randomly stops someplace]?" "To rhyme?" "Is that a causal or a teleological reason?" "Both probably, but that's more of a late-evening type discussion. Was any of that helpful?" "No. Fun and vaguely cathartic, but not helpful. I just... I just fucking wonder." No one had noticed the old woman setting up her canvas at the bridge’s brink, but even if they did, they probably wouldn’t ask her opinions on the matter, though she has a great many of them. She’s getting closer with every painting, she thinks. With every brush stroke. The bit of concrete is never actually in the pictures, and that’s important, somehow, she’d say. They’re from the bridge’s perspective. Lack-ward. She’s getting closer. Not to the other side, but to its absence. Meaning-wise.