A Bridge

I kicked it over the edge. The empty bottle spinning, falling toward the water. A few hundred feet below me it splashes into the water. I do not hear it over the wind and the rushing water. 

It is 1997 and I am fourteen, keeping balance on the steel girder running most of the length of the trestle bridge.  There is a game I play. I stick my toes over the edge. Keep my arms stretched out by my sides. Stand up straight. Soon, I inch a bit forward and now a third of my foot is over the edge. Soon half my foot. Eventually, amid the wind and November clouds, above the river and the town, I am weightless on my heels. I inhale and hold it.  I am weightless and I am not here and I am, for a moment, free. My only god the wind. And he spares me, always.

A few moments pass and I slowly bring my arms down and move back toward the bridge. Sit on the elevated ties and let the drunken haze wash over me, staring into the town below.

In a few months I will be kicked out of school. I will be alone. I will be institutionalized for the first time. In a few more months I will be in an apartment in the projects a few towns over. Tending to my pregnant girlfriend, and avoiding her drunken mother's wrath, in whichever form it takes at any given time. Screams. Knives. Threats. Kicking the doors off the hinges. Speaking to the air. In a few months I cross a gap and I never return. These are last days, but I do not then realize it.

I lay back and set my head on the steel rail and it hurts but I don't mind. There are no vibrations and everyone says trains don't use this bridge anymore. I've never seen one on it. All I see are the grey clouds above me. Thick and endless, spreading forever beyond the mountains and forests surrounding the town. Where I want to be. Away. Above. Beyond. 

My stomach twists with the stolen whiskey and not enough food and I roll to one side. It clenches and I am on my knees. I feel a splinter in my hand and recoil and as I do I clench again and vomit. I try to aim between the ties and some of it goes between them, but most of it hits the tie and splashes and I vomit again. Again. Soon only my stomach is clenching but nothing is coming up. My head is spinning and the splinter in my hand stings and there is puke on my clothes and face and I am glad I cut my hair a few months back. 

Spent the summer outside of Chicago. Cut my hair before I left. My mother felt it was best for me to go to Colorado and work with my uncle, doing construction. Might lift my spirits. Get a little money in my pocket. Give me a positive male role model. I flew out of Rhode Island alone and then to Houston, where I sat alone in the terminal and stared out at the skyscrapers in the distance and all I could think about was children living in vans with junkie parents and some of them would get sold and some would run away and thought that even though everything had happened the way it did, I was lucky. I mourned for those kids, sitting in that airport in Houston, and then I was on a plane again, into Colorado. I worked two days before getting sun poisoning and blisters. After work my uncle took me to a bar for a few hours. I would drink coke and read Stephen King's "Desperation", and after a little while he would fuck the bartender in the back room. Then we would drive home. My aunt and I began to leave Colorado some time after midnight about a week into my stay. She ran into my room. Hid beside my bed. 

He came in. I covered for her. He made threats. Smashed a glass. Went outside, cut her tires and drove off into the night in his large and senseless truck. On shredded rubber and rims, she and I, and my small cousin, began our journey then, slowly and with only a brief stop to sleep and get new tires in the neighboring town. In Chicago, at another Aunt's house, I stayed another month. Made friends on a Navy base. Met a girl. Used the eighty dollars I had earned to buy CD's. Eventually, came home.

A positive male role model.

Second verse, same as the first.

The November air bit at me through my sweater, with most of the alcohol now splayed violently across the ties I laid on. What was I to become? What was I to gain? Why should I want anything? Nothing lasts. No one sticks around. Your home is only as good as the people inside of it and suddenly I wanted to go home. To know my mother would be home soon. To play guitar and eat a sandwich. Take a shower and watch TV. To be home.

In a few months it would all be behind me, and I would never be able to return.

I  got to my feet and began walking. Took my sweater off, wiped whatever puke off me that I could, and threw it into the woods.