The Laight Street Bridge

Every day I walked and I found heaven in each step. I walked for hours through the city, giddy with freedom, wearing heavy headphones and never stopping, never even feeling tired. She was gone and with her presence all the bitterness had dissipated and my wounds had healed, the same circumstances that had destroyed her had healed me, or so it seemed. I wore her perfume and some of her clothes, when the occasion supported it, most were too chic and high end for a high school Senior. I felt everything deeply, as before, but now those swells were always dreamy, ecstatic, my inner life was unfettered and unchecked. I even felt closer than ever to her. I had her tucked away and when we met it was on my terms. She could no longer ever hurt me again, there wasn’t a cruel word or a sharp hand that could reach me now. I could run wild on the inside, never having to retreat to that strange, uninhabited place in the back of my mind, and so I never felt lonely.

I finished school each day around noon and then just lingered in solitary bliss, all over Lower Manhattan, on the West Side Highway, up and down Broadway, across Canal Street, the mall underneath where the Towers once stood, Chinatown, the Village. Sometimes there was a purpose, but not usually. Occasionally, I would be joined by a friend, which was a nice change of pace, but I always looked forward to being alone again. As the sun got low and the wind gathered its strength along SoHo and TriBeCa, I walked West, towards Hudson Street, where every evening from 5-7pm I answered phones in a quiet office. Often, I would cut over the Laight Street Footbridge with the roaring traffic underneath. The hum of the city always carried me, but it rose to a shriek as I crossed the bridge. The knowledge that I was safe amidst the terrible clamor flung my heart into the clouds above.

I was going to graduate soon and I had learned everything I needed to know. I learned from the New York Times how to understand the world, I learned from strangers I met on the Ferry I took home each night that you can never be sure of anyone’s intentions, I learned from my parents how to lie, to embellish or omit just the right details, so you can tell someone exactly what they want to hear. I learned from my older co-workers at the Dot Com company where I answered phones that I had a long way to go still and everything worth doing took time. I learned to mind my own business so I wouldn’t make anyone angry with me, so I wouldn’t get hurt.

Then I threw all this important knowledge away. Maybe I just misapplied it. Maybe it was too delicate a balancing act to last. His face was the missing part from a dream I once had, his kiss was the city delivering on its promises to me. The horror was rising up in me now. Heading toward the future wouldn’t be a straight line ahead, it was a loop, it was searching for what I had lost. That from which I thought I had extricated myself forever.

“You’ll never hear from me again,” he threatened if I decided to meet a friend for coffee.

So I stopped. I stopped meeting my friends on those disparate occasions, for a movie at the Angelika or coffee at a diner. I stopped telling elegant fibs to what was left of my parents and the lies became clunky, but by the time they landed with an unpleasant thud on the ever-widening plane between us, I was no longer even listening. I stopped reading the New York Times. I stopped going to school and I stopped answering phones at the Dot Com company office on Hudson Street. But I didn’t stop walking. Not yet.

We walked together and, in each step after the big fight, after the threats had come and gone, after the Spring evening swallowed my fears, melting them into the concrete, and my pleading had brought him back around, I found heaven. Afterwards, I laughed harder ever before. Laughed harder and louder with him next to me than when I sat in front of any movie at the Angelika, while reading any column in the New Yorker or with any friend sitting across from me in a coffee shop or Indian restaurant.

That was before I felt that terrible solitude, the clamor of traffic always inside where my thoughts were once wild and carefree, never feeling far away from danger, never knowing comfort and never walking blissfully through the shimmering Lower Manhattan Streets again.

Sometimes I still feel his hair under my fingertips, even now, decades later, standing with my back pressed up against the cool metal, his mouth demanding mine, right above the roaring traffic on the Laight Street Bridge.