Please love this lock

So many questions
London, ON
March 2022
This photo originally shared on Instagram

This is, from what I can tell, a love lock.

It isn’t keeping this fairly new and sleek-looking pedestrian bridge from being stolen. Love locks are often fastened to the railings of bridges, usually with poignant messages scrawled on them. Each one signifies a relationship, a story that hopefully is or was a happy one. It’s up to us to imagine what that story might have been.

In Paris, there’s a bridge called the Pont des Arts that a few years ago became so encrusted with love locks that authorities eventually banned the practice. Something about excessive weight that was never factored into the original engineering.

Still, I’d like to think that matters of practicality shouldn’t always prevail over matters of the heart, and that there’s lots of room for compromise in the shades-of-grey middle ground between engineers trying to keep bridges from topping into rivers and everyday folks just trying to connect.

We live in a world where not everyone is blessed with human connection. If a lock on a bridge can offer up hope, who are we to deny our fellow humans the chance to hold onto it a little more tightly?

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