To Build a Bridge

Like dusk finding the edge of day, I see my exhausted face in the mirror and I wonder if I still know who I am. Where is the strong, sharp, morally unambiguous man that I learned to enjoy facing the world within? And why do I find myself now aching to be heard?

Certainty now feels unattainable, almost holy. It now looks like a lighthouse that seems further and cloudier as time goes by. This feeling has now forced me to look directly at the dark waters underneath it, engulfed in currents of contradiction and the arrhythmic pulse of perspectives I’ve never understood, much less held.

You wear your opinion like metal armor. But armor is heavy, and it eventually rusts around you. In time, you forget how to bend… and how to feel. How can this armor allow you to let in anything that doesn’t echo your own voice? I’ve seen people, cities, entire nations bleed to death from a single unchecked belief. And it happened not because the belief was false, but because they refused to listen.

I’ve seen lovers decay into strangers because neither set down their sword long enough to say “I’m sorry, help me understand you”.

Do you know what is rarer than being right? Being understood. Do you know what is even rarer? Taking a step forward and making the decision to genuinely try to understand someone who frightens you with their difference. There’s Grace in being wrong, a quiet and aching Grace. It means you stepped out of your reflection in the mirror and explored someone else’s sky. It may be disorienting at first, like waking up on a hotel’s bed in a foreign country. But in time, this teaches you to speak without drawing blood.

True communication is not a performance. It is but a feeble bridge made of wet wood and unfinished sentences. It creaks, it sways… but it still connects. Arguments are not battles, they are just mirrors turned toward each other. Some of these mirrors crack, and others shatter. But if you are patient, some refract the light into something new, beautiful, almost celestial.

I want my voice to be a lantern, not a torch. And I want my silence to be a question, not a cage.

So, when the heat rises in your chest, I beg you to breathe before the next word becomes a harmful weapon. In the end you may still disagree. That’s fine, and even desirable. In music, in life, harmony is not sameness. It’s dissonance arranged with care and compassion for the other one. One day, someone will remember not what your argued, but how safe it felt to disagree with you. And in that memory, you will live on not as the loudest nor the most certain, but as the one who left space for the truth to breathe.

Build the bridge, even if it splinters beneath you, even if it leads nowhere. A bridge begins with just one word – not shouted loud, but softly heard. Build that bridge, and let the other one see it glowing with your honest attempt at listening, if only once, with an open heart. Leave the bridge standing as proof that someone once dared to reach across the silence. Because the ones who listen are the ones who change hearts quietly… and forever.