Burning Bridges

One of the easiest things to do is to burn something. Take an old letter from an ex-admirer: one flick of the lighter, and it is gone. Memories made into ash, obligations carbonised into flames, all proof destroyed. In the age of paper, burning was easy - memories could be wiped out, evidence destroyed, clandestine paths covered. It got trickier with digital memory: pointing a phone at the face of a sleeping person can open Pandora’s box to lay bare the life of a person. Some are meticulous about hiding, because burning is no longer an option - location tracking turned off, message records obsessively cleared, two-factor authentication and multiple passwords on phones to hide what can no longer be burned. Yet there is still much to burn, and in relationships, vanity leads to a confidence that new ties are strong enough to reduce old ones to ashes. Back in 1693, William Congreve, the British playwright, used the phrase “burn bridges” in The Old Bachelor to describe a man who destroyed his escape route from a failing relationship. Now, four centuries later, people constantly burn bridges in the artificial confidence that the past can be abandoned and no escape route will ever be needed. In doing so, people often hurt themselves by their misplaced self-assurance, because there is no guarantee on the other side; while the shore that has been disconnected does not change - it simply becomes inaccessible to the one who set fire to the bridge. There is no going back, because the last connection has been severed in the belief that there will never be a reason to return. The opportunities always appear glorious on the other side, and the old place was merely a stop on the way to new relationships and new possibilities. What is forgotten is that those old shores, once permanently severed, might hold a safe haven when new adventures fail - but the safety of the old place is now unreachable. The legend of Hernán Cortés in 1519 tells of how he destroyed his ships upon reaching Mexico, leaving no path of retreat, but in later years he had to build new ships to return - burning may have seemed decisive, but the need for return could not be erased. Not everyone has the chance to rebuild, and in migration or in intimacy, once the bridge is burned, one may not be welcome back. The one abandoned may not wish to rebuild what was betrayed. The lesson repeats in careers and relationships, in the modern world where it is easy to burn bridges because movement forward is celebrated, the old ties dismissed as irrelevant once their utility is exhausted. To the one who burns, this seems of no consequence, but to those cut off it is painful, and to the bridge itself - if we imagine it as something alive - there is a certain melancholy, for it was once a bearer of weight, a connection that whispered comfort, perhaps even the way Simon and Garfunkel sang: “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind.” But once burned down, there is no easing, only isolation, and the one who burned the bridge moves on alone—lonely.