[Header Photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash]

The bridge came to Penske Loving in a dream when they were 14 years old.

The dream was so vivid and intense Penske woke sitting up. The clock/radio softly glowed;  it was only 4:37 am, but Penske could not even imagine going back to sleep.

So they slipped out of bed, found a sheet of paper and a black ballpoint pen, and then carefully drew the bridge from the dream.

For a week or so, Penske would stare at the picture just before bed, hoping to revisit the dream. But that never happened.

Then, even though Penske had no experience or knowledge for building anything, they found a nearly perfectly flat and abandoned field—just like in the dream—and began building the bridge.

The bridge went over nothing except perfectly flat ground and went from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular. Penske only stepped off the distance, but it seemed to be about 30 or 40 feet.

Penske never told anyone about the bridge, and as far as they knew, no one ever saw it being built. They used anything they could find—random bricks, stones, lumber, tree branches and trunks.

The project from the dream took over a year, finished when Penske was 15. The bridge had consumed almost every moment of Penske’s mind and life for that year in fact.

A bridge over nothing, spanning from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular.

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Penske jerked awake. They sat there disoriented for a few moments before touching their phone screen. Another morning wide awake around 3 or 4 am.

They were 37 and slowly realized that in their dream they had been thinking about the bridge.

Penske had not thought of the bridge in many, many years.

Unable to fall back asleep, Penske tried to recall when they last visited the bridge or when they simply forgot about it entirely. These things had to have happened, they thought, even as they couldn’t pinpoint either.

Trying to remember was fruitless, and Penske simply feel asleep again, awakened a couple hours later by the phone alarm set for 6:21 on workdays.