Lone Traveler, by Jenny Bahn

The days lack humidity and I the desire to remain indoors.  Any time not spent outside is time wasted.  Perfect New York days must be relished with an acute appreciation of the fleeting opportunity to wander the city, unhindered by any weather-related inconvenience.  It is your duty, as a proud resident of this place, to take full advantage.  And so I venture.

I sit in a park filled with alpha males playing basketball, grunting and yelling at each other.  My steps face outward, away from the park and towards the traffic and honking and stinking garbage.  Rush hour.  A thick and heavy breeze rattles the leaves above me and inconveniently flips the pages on my magazine.  With it, the wind carries the brass bellows of a saxophone being played behind me by a man with gray hair.

I am alone but consumed.  This is a sensation I usually only get while traveling to foreign places with no companion.  I walk the streets, alone and listening, with nothing to do but observe.  There is no ego, no preoccupation with myself or another, just everything else.  You are wholly at the whim of something bigger than you: a city, older and sturdier than you will ever become, a living and breathing thing unto itself.

The cars honk and the people walk and I sit, sometimes reading and sometimes watching, falling in love with it all silently.

The sun begins its descension through my world and to another.  I’m meeting a friend in Brooklyn to celebrate the possibility that she won’t be broke anymore over mojitos.  As a subway ride would mean time spent away from this perfect evening, I decide to walk the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan.

I’ve crossed the bridge before, albeit on a bike – a gigantic, heavy, yellow Cadillac of a beach cruiser.  It had only one gear and my legs burned for days afterward.  It was a rushing and enthralling experience.  We watched Manhattan disappear and reappear in rapid succession as it was hidden and revealed by the structure of the bridge.

As I enter the threshold of the bridge, after walking past the Lower East Side and the depressing brown project buildings that follow, I pass under a sign reading “Williamsburg Bridge 1903”, covered in graffiti.  Beyond that, the curious repetition of faded red iron begins, caging me in tightly to its concrete pathway.  Over and over and over again the bars and patterns repeat themselves.  In the distance, the pink sky begins to blend in with the bars.  All of us, melting into each other.

The bars soon give way to thick iron structures, gray in color and painted many times over.  Rivets cover the surface like splayed buckshot.  Lights slowly flicker on.  Bodies turn into moving black shadows and the sky changes color again.

At the top of the bridge, I am struck with an overwhelming and anxious sensation similar to vertigo.  The sheer magnitude of the structure makes me dizzy.  I am reminded of a middle school math project that involved creating a bridge out of toothpicks and glue using geometric shapes.  We then tested our structures with a series of lead weights to see who had built the strongest bridge.  Of course, mine broke.

A subway passes by, not more than five feet away from me.  Cars blur past to my right.  People ride bikes and run and walk and stop to take pictures of the skyline.  I look up, distrustful that any bridge could be capable of holding this much weight year after year after year.  The ground below me shudders and I stare at the twisted metal ropes.  I walk faster.

By the time I make it into to Brooklyn, the sun has set low and the sky has been abandoned, awash in a soft blue soon to turn dark.  I purchase a plastic container of cut mango and leave the store with a fork.  Outside, in the warmth of the evening, the cold, delicious mango disappears in my mouth, melting like butter would.  It is the best mango I have ever had.  It is so good, in fact, that I save pieces for my friend so that she can later confirm my theory.  I walk, delicately placing bites of mango that sit soft on my tongue like the murmur from Bedford restaurants.

Maybe I’m just punch drunk from the weather, the heat caressing my legs like warmed cotton balls.  Maybe it’s the fact that I am finally alone and listening to this place.  But as I sit on a bench in Brooklyn, quietly absorbing the world, I think that I could not be happier than here in this moment, waiting for a friend and eating cold mango, watching dogs pass by on leashes and trees sway in a nighttime breeze.

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