Watery "I"s

I stood watching the river silently creep under me. The bridge that held my feet held itself steadily watching the continuous flow, as it always had from it’s early years of existence. The day sighed into twilight, tired of its long shift. 
There’s something about rivers and something about bridges that always get me. It’s like there’s this secret signature in my soul that makes me look at a river plundering on and feel like I have something in common with it, this silent bond of mutual understanding: always going somewhere, carrying bits and pieces from the past trying to get somewhere and not being really sure where ‘somewhere’ is. 
I like rivers. But I can’t hold them. 
I identify with them. And that’s why I am content to let them be rivers. 

Sometimes people get crazy ideas and try to reroute artificially a river - usually not a great idea. Sometimes they try to hold them in, or take in their energy. But trying to hold a river in seems wrong, seems somehow like a sin, like taking away it’s identity and trying to make it into something it is not - and so pressure builds, and builds, until the slightest crack in a dam is enough for it to insistently dig in until it can make it’s way out, to be the river it was to be in the first place. 
Some people are lakes, and are easily contained - and if you try to make them into a river, they will just dry up. Others are rivers, and if you try to contain them, pressure will build until it bursts. They need to find a sea to spill into, and lose themselves in. Others are rain that falls soft upon fields, silently but surely. Others are a mad storm that pours and then never comes back. 
The thing is: each person is one way, and you can either take them how they are, or you can try to mould and shape them to what you want - but that’s robbing them of their identity, of what they are to be. 
I like the idea that people are like water because we need water to live, and most of us is made from this exogenous molecule that is constantly being substituted in our bodies. 

- An utterly unromantic digression - 

Technically, the person you love most in the world is 72.8% water.  

We need it to live, and to survive, and it comes from all sorts of origins and end up making us who we are. But, at the same time, you can’t hold water in your hands, it cannot be contained by frail fingers. It slips, it flees and flows. It comes in the form that it comes - from a chuckling river, patient lake, wild ocean, and we can take it or leave it, and no more can be done. We can drink it in and let it be part of us, or we can leave it altogether. But we can’t hold it, or save it for later. We can’t take all of it in at once, or it would kill us - we take little by little. It goes changing us, and becomes part of us. Sometimes, we come back for more and drink a person in, and they keep becoming more and more of us - but that requires the effort to come back to the source. 
Love is letting the lake be a lake and a river be a river, and be content in doing so because you know that trying to make them into anything else would rob them of their identity. Sometimes, in love, more important than knowing when to hold on, is knowing when to let go. Let the river take its course.

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them” ― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island 

And this is why I like bridges: They connect, and they bring together, without interruption. You can be near the river, you can practically be on the river: have your feet dangling down and touching the water, but never keeping it from being itself. It is a place for meeting, and it is a place of meeting - where two margins meet. It is like margins on a mutual agreement to reach out to one another, letting the river run freely. 

I wish people were more like bridges and less like dams, that they would reach out rather than try to contain. That they would be there, but also let be. But then maybe that’s just me, trying to make a lake into a river.