One day not long after I moved to New York, I looked up from my writing desk at a shared studio space on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the Manhattan Bridge halved, only the Brooklyn side remaining, the rest vanished into a sea of fog that had erased Manhattan.

A sight with the strangeness of a dream, piercing the reality of the late-autumn morning.

An augury, a living metaphor, a revelation: Every moment of transition is a bridge receding from the firm ground of the known life it into the fo...