The Bridge Club

With every step, branches lightly scrape my arms and legs. One even catches my sweater. Stopping to remove it, I recall how only a decade earlier I never would have noticed. The brown, crisp leaves crunch under my feet reminding me of the many autumns we spent jumping in leaf piles and rolling around in the fields. This thought, coupled with the broken sunlight causes me to shiver as the feeling of lost innocence again fills me. Walking along, I wonder how many of us will show up later tonight and how we will respond to one another. I know it will only be idle conversation and as my mind’s eye scans the young faces of my old group of friends, one is missing. The one person I want to see. The one I know won’t be there. A bit of sadness fills me.

Finally, after peeling back the branches and stumbling over covered stones, our place, the bridge, emerges from the trees. The place that once was a permanent fixture in our lives. Unlike the old high school, time and the elements have done their best to destroy this once sturdy structure. Its red paint has peeled away and its long, wooden planks have warped under the pressure of rain and wind. The roof sags from the weight of repeated snowy winters. Freshly sprayed graffiti is mixed in with the decaying paint, a sign that the new generation had indeed paid an occasional visit to our old place, lacking the awe we once had for it. Debris from the far side, the side that collapsed that final stormy night, surrounds the opposite opening amidst the tall grass. The winds and weather of a decade have scattered the shattered pieces of planking, throwing them to the places they now rest. I look at the decrepit structure and struggle to see, instead, our bridge of a decade ago. The bridge that had seen us at our best and our worst, that echoed with our laughter, that sheltered us from the rain and at times become a trash can for all the beer cans we emptied.

As I enter, I notice the same recent artists have decorated the inside. Moving slowly toward the middle, the inner darkness completely surrounds me. The far collapsed side that once looked out towards the river now blocks the sunlight from guiding my way through. It doesn’t matter. I know every inch. Running my hands over the sides, a sense of peace, one I could only hope to feel here, returns. It becomes easier to remember everything this place once meant to us. The old wooden planks creak under each step as memories flood my brain. One in particular stands out among all the others. It is the memory that has stopped me from coming back before now. Thinking of this time, those ten years ago, I turn and walk back out into the light, finding a soft place in the grass next to the old structure. Leaning against the bridge I watch the stream below running wild from the autumn rain. The remaining colors of the trees run into one reflection in its waters and move toward the larger river. The water’s flow and a faint rustling of the few remaining leaves above me help clear my thoughts.

In tune with the rushing current, the memories of our senior year flow wildly through my mind. They are overwhelming, so long trapped and searching for a spillway. They want to be shared yet I have not been ready. Now, on the eve of our tenth reunion, I am ready to let them flow free. I don’t know why I have waited so long to tell this story, our story. Maybe I was too young or immature to tell it the way it deserved to be told. Anyway, I am ready now. I have felt its footsteps pace the hallways of my brain too long. It is time to allow them to walk freely about the earth, spreading their truth like ripe, young seeds floating on the breeze.

Our senior year surrounded these events, a time when all we should have been thinking about was the prom, graduation, and which college we would attend. I miss those days, the days when we were all friends. When we thought nothing could ever separate us. But we were all about to learn that we were friends more because of circumstance than choice. Like the ice that covered the ponds of Spring Brook in winter, we thought the bonds between us could never break as we carelessly raced through our young lives. Yet the whole time, a current flowed underneath, weakening those bonds without our noticing. The events surrounding Mr. D’Orio were the breaking point, the point when all of us fell into the icy waters of adulthood. Until that moment, we all thought we would be friends forever. But as the harsh, cold reality washed over us, forever became a lot shorter than any of us ever thought.