Birmingham Bridge Post #10: Carrying On

I'll address this to everyone today.

The seasons almost blend together. There is always rain. 

This morning I went on a run in the cool, post-rain wind. It stormed last night for about three hours and then just poured on the city. I sat in Schenley Park, behind the Frick Fine Arts Building, tried to find some quiet to write in. When there is good weather in Pittsburgh the whole city comes out to revel in it. I finally settled far enough away from the other college students and high school students, but close enough to hear a little league baseball coach yelling encouragement to eight year olds. With music, notebook, and pen I found a small amount of serenity for an hour. It started to thunder and lightening a cool twenty minutes before anything else happened. God was warning us that shit was going to hail down, literally. I paid no attention, smiling at the prospect of getting wet, of being vulnerable and unprotected against the storm.

I braced myself with a playlist and carried on. It wasn’t until I felt big, hard drops, something like hail, that I decided to pack it in. I knew I wouldn’t beat getting soaked, but that maybe I shouldn’t get caught in a flood. As I stepped into the street to cross to the bus stop the water came up over my ankles. I saw small bits of leaves and dirt stuck to my thighs as Jason Mraz’s “A Beautiful Mess” blasted my soul through the turmoil from the sky. As I stood under the bus stop shelter I started to get a little cold, no longer walking to keep my body warm. When the bus came I plunged into the street. The bus driver yelled at me, saying that she was trying to pick me up at the curb so I didn’t have to do that. I smiled, thinking of how none of that matters. 

It was no longer such a heavy rain once I was walking home from the bus stop. I stayed out there as long as I could as the rain started to cool to a lower temperature on my dress and fleece jacket. I walked into the house dripping, unbelieving of how new I felt. Peeling my clothes off I was pretty cold. It was the first time I’d felt uncomfortable through this. I thought of the Birmingham Bridge and how it would look after this shower.

This morning I went for a run at 7am. The bridge, even rusted, looked cleaner, the concrete path wasn’t full of as much litter and spilled food. My skin breathed and shook as the wind grazed it while my legs pumped. It wasn’t long before I was just walking and thinking. A friend recently told me to take a walk and cry, that I’d feel better. But now I know that grief isn’t just tears.

This semester I learned the importance of rain and water to my relationship with the bridge and my writing in general. Without these three rivers we are surrounded with in Pittsburgh there wouldn’t be any refuge on the bridge for me, without the rain that so often visits this city the river wouldn’t be as vast, the waters as changing and new, they’d be equally as filled with pollution as they were fifty years ago. I, too, feel new as well as rusted in the rain. My skin feels so smooth as I stand in the downpour but when it stops it dries cold and my skin ashes. I feel human then. 

I learned to move from eroticism and fantasy to the more human aspect of my relationship with the Birmingham Bridge and its surroundings. It took until nearly the end of the semester for me to understand that I came to the bridge as a place to sweat and breath away my sorrow and pain. I finally found a way to write through grief, by letting the subject of my writing be something other than my grandma or my own struggle. The subject became Birmingham’s relationship to the old Brady Street Bridge, what the bridges do for the surrounding neighborhoods, what the relationship between the bridges and the waters are, and the cars, birds, and graffiti I found on the bridge. 

I came to understand prose a little more, rather than just prose poetry. I’m still working at it, but my writing has changed with the seasons. As warmth is becoming more certain my words are clearer and my prose more strategic. I still hold onto lyric but now am getting the hang of telling a full story. When I first looked at the bridge I saw a cold, dead thing with potential. Now I look at the bridge and I see the cracks and crevices I’ve stood at and run over and around. I see the rust it took so long to notice, because I held the bridge at arm’s length creating it in perfection in my mind. 

I am now able to contextualize the bridge as a part of a larger relationship with Pittsburgh’s history. Like getting to know someone those details have become essential to what I feel about my place, the Birmingham Bridge. I’m not sure I’ll ever know another place so deeply, or a place that will help me without saying a word or moving. 

I am unable to separate my growth as a person with my growth as a writer this semester. They are one in the same for me. I write to ease the tension in my mind, the same reason I run. By actively forming this relationship to the bridge I bonded those two things together. I’m not sure they were ever supposed to be separate. It is as gloomy out today as it was that first day I walked upon the bridge and decided it would be my subject. It is much warmer out with no snow. But somehow I feel the sun pushing at the clouds in a way winter sun doesn’t. Somehow I feel like I am that sun behind those clouds trying to break and illuminate, to let the bridge and other non-moving pieces of the city warm their bodies because they cannot move on like I can.