Short Original...Thing?

[triedunture]

Bridge

I take the bridge home because it's a clear day, because the heater in my office has just kicked in, because my skin is too tight and my head is too full of ideas and my eyes are too blurry and the subway is too closed up, like a little tin full of stale coffee grounds. The bridge is open and wind-licked and wonderful at dusk, when the sun dips out of sight behind the lower west side skyscrapers and leaves only pollution-tinged oranges and pinks in the streaked clouds.

Tourists are packed in here. Ignoring or ignorant of the divided paths cutting swaths down the length of the old creaky wooden slats, a walkway repaired and reformed over a hundred years, still beaten down by the shoes of pedestrians. By the tires of bicycles. By the wind and the water coming off the East River.

Everyone is here to take pictures. They're seeing sights; I am commuting.

I keep my head down, eyes on the couples (sometimes a trio but everyone grouped together in some number other than one) directly ahead of me, gauging distance, speed, time it will take to overcome and pass.

Sometimes, my calculations are screwed up when people stop. In the middle. And get out a camera.

There's a camera, a cell phone, a tiny mini-recorder in every palm. My hands are stuffed in my pockets, shoulders hunched as I beetle around each newly dropped rock in the walkway stream. I'm constantly getting in the way of photographs, providing the background in countless family videos.

How many family albums will I appear in now? How many times has my impatient gesture, my darting glare, been caught on film? How many Dietderich-like figures are now looming behind the happy tourist, straddling the dividing white line that they are supposed to stay to the right of, arms crossed across chests, daring their friend or lover photographer to shoot them with the Brooklyn Bridge's great stone walls rising behind them?

Everyone takes that photo, I want to tell them. And it never comes out.

I keep walking, never looking back to Manhattan until I reach the second platform. That's the spot where you can see the Chrysler and the Empire State, not just the financial district's glassy skyline, which is ugly and impossible. To the right (now that I've turned) is the Manhattan bridge, and then beyond that, the Williamsburg bridge. If I could see around the twists in the river, if the day were clearer and the lights of the city weren't slowly powering on with the coming dark, maybe I could see the bridge that sits outside my office window, the Queensboro bridge, swathed like a pirate ship in canvas sails, being mended by unseen forces beneath the billowing sheets.

In the town where I grew up, there used to be only one bridge, a draw bridge, across the St. Lucie river; when a boat came through, traffic would be backed up for miles in either direction. They built a soaring concrete behemoth of a bridge right over it, so that now, you can still drive over the old bridge, deep in the shadow of the new one. The new one was clean and wide, with big, safe sidewalks on either side for speed-walkers and dog-walkers and walking walkers. The new one provided a better way for people to evacuate when the hurricanes came. The new one was better.

I always took the old bridge. I never wanted it to feel like no one loved it anymore.

Standing on the platform closest to Brooklyn, I can watch the cars speeding beneath my feet, zooming onward back into the city I just walked out of. The bright bulbs dotting the great swooping cables of the bridge light up, though it must be a slow, steady flare-up, because I don't notice it until I look for it. The sun is almost gone; the tourists are getting in their last pictures of the Statue of Liberty before it disappears into the dark harbor along with Governor's Island, a faceless shape sprinkled with drops of light.

Traffic helicopters are still thumping overhead. Art students are huddled like the homeless at the base of the second stone wall, in the middle of the two gaping almond gateways, tipped on their sides, that allow passage on either side of the white dividing line.

That no one pays attention to.

Comments

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Niiice.

Particularly the last line - so true (though I've only ever been a tourist on that bridge).

[lady529.livejournal.com]

I like. More soon, yes?

The Lady 529