“Midnight on Cedar Bridge”

The first time I saw Cedar Bridge, I was seventeen and running.

It was 2:14 a.m., July 1998.

My dad’s pickup was out of petrol, my lip was split, and the only thing louder than the crickets was the shouting still echoing behind me.

I took the dirt track everyone said didn’t exist anymore, the one that cut through the pines and ended at the old covered bridge nobody had repaired since the flood of ’73.

Cedar Bridge was waiting.

Red planks, sagging roof, a single word spray-painted across the entrance in dripping white:

ONCE.

I thought it was a warning.

I walked through anyway.

Halfway across, the air changed.

The crickets stopped.

My heartbeat slowed like someone had turned the volume down on the world.

At the far end stood a girl my age in a yellow sundress, barefoot, hair wet like she’d been swimming.

She smiled the way you smile at someone you’ve been waiting for your whole life.

“You’re late,” she said.

I knew her voice.

I’d never met her.

She held out her hand.

I took it.

The moment our palms touched, the bridge lit up (not with electricity, but with memory).

Every step showed me a different year that hadn’t happened yet:

Me at twenty-two, laughing in a hospital corridor, holding a newborn with her eyes.

Me at thirty, standing in a church I didn’t recognise, watching her walk toward me in white.

Me at forty-five, sitting on this same bridge, older, greyer, her head on my shoulder while fireflies blinked like slow stars.

Then the final step: me at seventeen again, but alone, walking away from the bridge with blood on my knuckles and emptiness in my chest.

The girl squeezed my hand.

“You get to choose,” she whispered. “Stay and live everything you just saw… or keep walking. But if you leave, the bridge forgets you. And you forget the bridge. Forever.”

I looked back the way I’d come.

I could still hear my father’s voice in the distance, drunk and furious.

I looked forward.

The girl’s eyes were the colour of cedar after rain.

I was seventeen.

I thought love was something you escaped to, not something you walked into with both eyes open.

I let go of her hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She didn’t cry.

She just nodded like she’d known the answer before I did.

The bridge went dark.

I stepped off the far side and kept walking until sunrise.

Twenty-seven years later I came back.

Same dirt track, now overgrown with brambles.

Same bridge, older, half-collapsed, condemned signs hanging like cheap jewellery.

It was midnight again.

July again.

I was forty-four, divorced, daughter grown and gone, successful enough to buy the whole town and still feel hollow.

I walked to the centre of the bridge.

The word ONCE had faded to a ghost.

I waited.

Nothing happened.

I told myself that was good.

Then I heard barefoot steps behind me.

She hadn’t aged a day.

Still seventeen.

Still yellow sundress.

Still cedar-rain eyes.

She held out the same hand.

“You came back,” she said, softer than memory.

“I never really left,” I answered.

This time I didn’t hesitate.

I took her hand.

The bridge remembered everything.

The years unfolded again (the same ones I’d seen at seventeen), only now I lived them in fast-forward: the birth, the wedding, the quiet evenings on this exact bridge watching our daughter chase fireflies.

When the visions ended, we were standing in the same spot, but the bridge was new (red paint bright, roof solid, moonlight pouring through the slats like silver rain).

She kissed me once, gentle as forgiveness.

“Some roads you only cross once,” she said. “But the brave ones cross back.”

Behind us, the entrance now read a different word, fresh and white:

ALWAYS.

I never saw the other side of Cedar Bridge again.

I didn’t need to.

I live here now (me, her, the daughter we still haven’t named yet).

We keep the bridge painted.

We leave the lights on.

And every midnight, if you’re running from something, or toward something, or just lost, the bridge appears.

It still only lets you cross once.

Choose carefully.

Some roads follow you forever.

This one lets you follow it home.