Dear diary:
There’s a bridge on the south side of the town.
It’s a nice bridge, as far as bridges go. It keeps people above the river, which is what bridges are meant to do. On weekends people bring folding chairs onto the bridge and fish off of it.
Long, long ago some teenagers graffitied “Class of 1998” on it, and no one’s ever bothered to clean it off. There isn’t any other graffiti on it, other than what can be done in under five minutes with a sharpie.
It’s a suspension bridge. The river, really a tributary to a much larger river, isn’t wide enough to merit two towers, so the cables are held up by a single thick concrete tower that’s illegal to climb. Originally the steel cables had been painted white, but some politician a few years back wanted to show how “woke” he was, and changed the color scheme to a rainbow. It pissed some people off, but in all honesty the effect is pretty cool.
A crazy homeless guy named Jim lives under it on the north side. I don’t mean that in a “oh, he’s homeless and therefore weird” kind of way, I mean it in a “he one time went around town asking people for the sock off their left foot” kind of way. He vanishes every so often, and the prevailing theory is that he gets taken to some mental institution for treatment. But he always comes back. He likes mini cupcakes, and if you give him a box of them he’ll sit down and tell you a story of dubious reality involving things like dogs with laser eyes or talking potatoes. There used to be a newspaper column on Sunday, in the funnies section between the sudoku and the horoscope, where someone would write down Jim’s stories and publish them.
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But why should you care? Why am I telling you about the bridge?
Well, sometimes it’s easier to write about things that don’t matter. Sometimes it’s easier to let your mind focus on the bridge you can see out your window than the things on the other side of your bedroom door.
Sure, I could write all about how my dad and brother had another bad argument today. I could write about how Mom called and said she’d be super busy this weekend and wouldn’t be able to take us. Again. I could write about school, how I’m bad at math and how I got made fun of in Spanish for forgetting how the weird N is pronounced.
But I don’t want to. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the bridge.
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The architect who designed it was a man named Louis Bridge, and for a long time the official name of the bridge was “Bridge Bridge”. I liked that name. So did a lot of other people, but eventually politicians with their zero sense of humor (and absolutely no creativity) renamed it to “South Bridge”. All this is very specific, and I only know it because there’s a bronze plaque on the tower that explains it.
In December they string Christmas lights along the two big main cables. Apparently they keep thinking of leaving them up, but then the electric bill comes in on January second and they immediately take them down. It looks cool, even if the festive red and green flashes light up my bedroom at night and make it hard to sleep.
Last year some kids climbed to the top and tried to skateboard down one of the cables. They didn’t die or anything, but it didn’t end well. Alcohol was involved, and they got more in trouble for that than the skateboarding.
One of these days I want to climb to the top of the tower. Or better yet, on a cloudless night. I bet it’s a great place to watch the stars, higher than anything else and completely separate from the world. It’s probably quiet and calm up there; a great place to think.
It’s probably a great place to write.
I like the bridge.
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