the bridge

[excerpt from chapter]

For me it was this specific bridge and looking down at the water. It was on my walk back and forth from the doctor’s office every 3 weeks, every 6 weeks, 3 months, how ever often I had to go back. And other times too. And in winter it was more. Due to the power plant up river and its use of river water to cool the plant, our river never fully freezes over. And there is this part just near the edge, close to where the snow-covered ice meets the water where the ice must be thin. And there is this feeling, what it would be like to hit that ice, to break through to the cold underneath, to be fully enveloped by the millions of simultaneous pain pricks. To be completely overwhelmed. It’s this feeling. And although the bridge is long gone and it has been so long since I have been able to walk over it, I still remember that feeling, that feeling I have never actually experienced. All those other experiences from high school, from my early 20s, even though they actually happened, they lack the intensity of that, even after all these years. It feels like the external finally matching the internal. Perhaps even, the external being able to overwhelm the internal. And it feels like freedom.

And when the bridge was condemned and we were no longer allowed access to it, because there was a risk, that at any moment it could collapse, I wanted to just lay there, lay on what had been the driving deck of the bridge, that asphalt, and look up at the stars and just wait for the whole thing to drop into the river.

And then it was gone. On one of the coldest mornings of the year a huge chuck of the city came out to watch two of the remaining spans fall down onto the filled in river bed as the connection points were blown up. And then later, they did another one. The other side came down, a little less well attended, maybe there just wasn’t enough cold to prove how tough we Saskatchewanians all are. And as they starting building the replacement, one span in the middle of the river with water on both sides remained. I used to think about how hard it would be to jump from now. How I would need a boat, to somehow climb up the pier just to get up there to get back off. And then it unceremoniously came down. Having found that the piers were not as good as expected and blowing up the edges to bring down the spans was not worth it, this one was slow, and hardly noted as construction equipment brought it down bit by bit.

It felt like it should mean something.

Like maybe the end of it should mean something. Like maybe the end of it should mean the end of me wanting to jump. And as the new one went up, and how ugly it looked to me as they began to build, that that romance of hitting of the water should die. That just as the bridge not being that high off the water and the inescapable man-made weir downstream that I really did not want to die bobbing around in had burst the dream when I was younger, somehow the bridge being gone, I should have been over it by now. But it seemed to mean nothing. I can still feel that water on my skin, I am still consumed by the release, and I just want it to be okay.

And from that came these. Phases of Victoria Bridge I & II and Can’t Jump.