The Aurora Bridge and the Empty Hours of a Lost Year

A walk from downtown to Fremont

Wherever you are, I hope you’ve had a chance to get outside and be tender with yourself. The trees are blooming where I am and the one outside my window is the most stunning of them all, creating again for me my own private wall of green to cover up the parking garage across the street. I have watched it come to life gradually every morning this week, pulling the blinds open while the coffee cooled on my desk.

On Tuesday afternoon, after the trial updates had taken more than a disproportionate amount of my time, I shut my computer and - still in my rubber flip-flops – ran down the carpeted stairs to the front of my building and threw the door open. I stood under the awning, taking short, hard breaths while the air around me grew thicker. The verdict being the opposite of what I expected, I didn’t know how or what to process. I was thinking of Rodney King.

Eventually, I took a step forward and I ended up on my usual route to South Lake Union, among the joggers, bikers and dog walkers. This is one of my favorite after-work routes, just through the marina and past the houseboats, under the Aurora Bridge and eventually to Fremont.

Here is something you should know about me: if there is a bridge nearby, I will likely fall in love with it. And the Aurora Bridge - having imprinted itself onto my young mind one day in 1999 - remains, for me, the most intoxicating piece of Seattle’s infrastructure. It was twilight, I was sitting alone in the middle row of my father’s light blue Dodge Caravan and we were taking the long way home when we crossed over the bridge. “This is the suicide bridge,” my dad said casually, and I was instantly spellbound.

Back in those days, there was no googling something on your phone while you sat in the backseat of your parent’s car. You had to wait until you got home and hope that there were enough hours on the AOL browser, or you waited until you went back to the school library and could get an internet pass. The next day and for many days after that I read everything I could about the bridge; all those people who jumped from it and all those people who saw them jump. It seemed to me like it was a witness to the pain of being human. This was heady stuff for a moody teenager who had a lot of feelings and very few productive outlets for them. I used to sneak away from the library to take the bus across the bridge and write terrible poems in memory of the complete strangers who had gone long before I was born.

These days the bridge mostly reminds me of my own life; the time that has passed since the year I discovered it and the way this cantilever, hovering high above my hometown, has been a marker of what changes and what remains as I get older. Perhaps more than any others so far in my life, this year has been an exercise in marking time. Some days I feel as though I am an inanimate thing like a bridge, watching life happen externally. The hours in which not much happens, the days in which history is made, the extremes of loneliness and the feeling that for the first time in our lives we are all connected by bonds forged in pain.

Logically, I know that I am not inanimate. That my brain is still logging memories from these days and hours. That this year is not lost and the hours are far from empty. And that, just like I am now nostalgic for the hectic days before this pause, when I “didn’t even have time” for an evening walk, someday I will be nostalgic for these quiet and lonely days. I know that this is life now, that we are progressing even in the stillness, and that there was never such a thing as a “pause” as long as life went on. All this time, we have been living. We are still living.

Won’t you celebrate with me?