Bridge
by Mark—Age 30—Astoria, OR
The bridge I see from my window rises quickly from Oregon and crosses a river so wide it could be confused for the ocean it feeds.
Bridges occupy a piece of real estate in Sarah’s brain. She’ll spot them on trips and make me pull over. Covered bridges, short steel trussed spans bridging creeks and the Art Deco jobs with turquoise lights.
“Take my picture,” she’d say. “But make sure to get the bridge.”
I remember, years ago, leaving my first girlfriend for a family trip during the summer. I thought about the nights we had spent under the shadow of the rusting water tower near my house.
Her name was Natalie, and she didn’t care about bridges.
She had that sixteen-year-old skin. Her vanilla perfume would hover near her collarbones like a necklace.
When we were apart, I carved a piece of her out of the air and looked at it too long. When I returned, she was just a stranger walking through the high school halls.
Years later, relationships later, I met Sarah. She has tide pool hazel eyes with purple and blue anemone speckles clinging to the edges of her pupils.
We’d make love in the morning and nap. After a while, I’d look up, and she’d be gazing at me with those eyes.
We’d drive over the mountains and past the jagged lava fields or west to the coast, the dunes and the juniper trees. She was always scanning the road ahead or searching the side roads for a river or creek. Water meant a bridge was close by.
And now, Sarah and I are separated by work and geography. There’s a thousand rivers and a hundred bridges between us.
The hulking bridge framed by my window runs four miles across the river bar and ends in a different state. The land on the other side is similar, but if you look close, you can see differences. The ponderosas seem flatter, just as the bridge is flat after its aerial leap from the south bank of the river.
I wonder if Sarah will still be looking for bridges if we ever reunite. Maybe she has tired of them. Or maybe, tonight, when the lights of town boil out toward the middle of the river, I’ll reach out the window, grab the dust-green steel tresses of the bridge before me and crush them with my bare hands.
(Photo: Estherase)
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