The Weight of the Span

I remember standing on the pier at Brighton when the wind was so fierce it felt like a physical hand pushing against my chest. There was a woman standing near the railing, staring out at the grey churn of the English Channel. She wasn’t looking at the horizon; she was looking at nothing in particular, her coat whipping around her legs like a flag in a storm. I wanted to ask her if she was waiting for a boat or just waiting for the wind to die down, but the air felt too heavy for small talk. We stood there for ten minutes, two strangers anchored to the same wooden planks, neither of us moving. It is a strange thing, how we can be surrounded by the vastness of the world and yet feel entirely contained within the small, quiet orbit of our own thoughts. Sometimes, the most crowded places are the ones where we are most profoundly alone.

Jose Juniel Rivera-Negron has captured this exact feeling in his work titled Alone on a Bridge. It is a striking reminder of how we carry our own solitude with us, even in the middle of a busy day. Does this scene remind you of a time you felt truly untethered?