The Dreamer's Bridge

If you ever find yourself traveling from Jalukbari to the airport in Guwahati, there’s a bridge you’ll pass, right in the middle of the journey in Dharapur area. It's nothing extraordinary at first glance. Just a strip of concrete connecting two lands: Kamrup Metropolitan on one side, Kamrup Rural on the other.

But this bridge isn’t just a passage. It's a line, thin and trembling, between two worlds. One of rush, the other of rest.

For years, that bridge was home to a homeless man. A home to the homeless. There’s something quietly strange about that phrase itself, isn’t there? As if the universe itself couldn’t decide where to place him, so it left him suspended, between belonging and not.

I remember passing by when I was in college, and something about the scene just... stayed with me. It struck deep. Because that man, sitting quietly on the foothpath of the bridge, was more than just an individual without shelter. He was a metaphor. A symbol. Of so many like him: trapped in between.

On one side of the bridge, the city stretches out in urgency. The endless hum of ambition, skyscrapers scraping against time, people chasing paychecks, status, security. The so-called successful. Those who have "made it."

On the other side, the village waits with open skies and the smell of wet earth. The slow rhythm in the evening. Silence that isn’t empty, but full.

And then... there are the ones like him. Like so many of us. Stuck!

People who don’t quite fit into either world. People who love the scent of soil after rain, who feel poetry in the pause, but are forced to run anyway. Not because they want to. But because the world won't stop demanding.

They don’t belong to the village anymore, it’s changed, or they have. But the city doesn’t want them either. It only accepts you if you match its pace. If you become one of them.

So, they linger. On the bridge. Halfway between who they were and who they’re told to become. Between rest and restlessness. Between silence and sound.

Some, eventually, jump! literally or metaphorically, too tired to stay in limbo. 

Others... 

they stay. 

Stuck. 

A life lived in pause. A home on a bridge.

And every time I cross it now, I wonder...

How many of us are really running forward?

And how many are simply stranded, on some invisible bridge, waiting to belong again?