He waits for her on the bridge, listening to the wet slosh of cars pviagrasing on the highway below, watching the hooded traffic guard in their gaudy neon raincoats direct the flow of traffic and children leaving the neighborhood preschool. He has packed her lunch in a round, plastic container, the kind that restaurants send take-out in. Wrapped twice in aluminum foil, it sits at the bottom of his black, fabric messenger bag.
The wall, the bridge: they refer to these things as if there’s only one of each in existence and it’s their bridge straddling the highway snaking down the west side of Manhattan and it’s their painted and faded mural wall outside BMCC and only theirs, a certain mentality that grows from the school’s stifling prestige that allows for this sense of ownership. Their wall, their bridge, as if no one else ever crossed the Tribeca bridge, as if no one else ever sat on the wall and ate lunch, as if the occasional morning runner, dog walker or lone Wall Street banker making their way across the aging wood panels were just anomalies, visitors, trespassers, as if the college students that join the steady outpouring of high schoolers from the 1,2,3 station and that eventually diverge at the community college were lesser beings. But, it’s just a bridge, a wall, a school, a collective being petty and insignificant, like ants hurdling against tidal waves of rain, not quite knowing that there’s something bigger out there but fearing that there is. Four years and they walk away knowing that they survived one wave, one day, one flippant act of nature, one flippant summer thunderstorm. Four years of not quite knowing but knowing it all along, four years and Four years and they can say they lived it, they owned it.
What is it like to lose yourself in something so much bigger? When your senior year dwindles down to nothing, to goodbyes and pictures and those long afternoons playing pointless card games in Chinatown, the inside jokes and harmless insults, all that wasted time but to you, it means so much more. Is it fear or nostalgia, or both, that makes you wish this year would never end, that maybe it would loop and rewind and tape over itself. Stepping on the thin line between when life starts to matter and when it used to be good, wishing you never needed to cross it. The pasty insides of this school, as if someone will poor color coordination threw up on everything, you’ll eventually miss that too. Long for voices the echo in the corridors, the faces that fade in and out of rooms, wishing you can take a piece of it with you but knowing there aren’t many pieces left to take.
God, I hate being so damn sentimental. Why is it going by so fast when all I want is for it to last, last just a little bit longer so I can sink my teeth into this feeling, into this moment and hold on to it and remember it, remember them. God, I wish I spent more time on the more important things.