Underneath the Bridge of Sighs (a folk tale)

Mary-Margaret, it has been said, spent many cool blue evenings underneath the Bridge of Sighs.

Cradled in its sturdy wooden arms, she escaped the arbitrary injustices of the workaday world and found more than a measure of peace and acceptance in the quiet above the river.

Held safe and free there, Mary-Margaret gave her soul free reign and basked in the shadowy solitude underneath the Bridge of Sighs. She paid no heed to the occasional travelers who passed above, their wheels and their booted feet eliciting melodic sighs and soothing groans from the bridge's weathered timbers.

Mary-Margaret, the story goes, was utterly safe from the random vagaries of the world when she was underneath the Bridge of Sighs...this she herself knew, deeply and gratefully in her fragile/powerful young woman's heart, without a hint of a doubt.

Brief respite...not never-ending escape...is what Mary-Margaret sought underneath the Bridge of Sighs and that is, much more often than not, what she found there.

And so she came...so safe underneath the Bridge of Sighs...and she looked down into the blue-green waters of the ambling river; the same waters that accepted her tears freely and without judgment or recrimination and used them, in turn, to give birth to magical kind of healing on the muddy riverbanks and the fertile earth beyond.

And so she came...so safe underneath the Bridge of Sighs...and looked up into the blue-black expanse of the trackless nighttime sky; the same sky that blessed and redeemed her with its distant light and gave flight, if only for fleeting moments, to the bittersweet burdens that are ever part and parcel of the life of a young woman with a fragile/powerful heart.

And so she came...so safe underneath the Bridge of Sighs...and the nightbirds and autumn winds gave pause as Mary-Margaret breathed deep the brisk air and then gave wondrous, mournful, healing voice to her joys and her sorrows...to her passions and her pains...in cries and whispers, in blue and golden melodies that echoed from the most guarded depths of her young woman's soul in songs that celebrated the tears in the river...and the lights in the sky...and the sanctuary of peace and redemption underneath the eternal Bridge of Sighs.

And even unto this day, as it is told by some and believed by many, those who really want to can always hear and know Mary-Margaret...they can see the tears still being welcomed into the forgiving river, know the light dancing in the expansive sky, hear the song...alive with hope and sorrow and blood and passion and salvation...echoing forever in the safe haven of the cool shadows underneath the Bridge of Sighs.

(for M)