I wore shoes to absolute pieces when I lived in New York. Vans, moto boots, funky high heels with enough padding to theoretically last out the apocalypse: I wore them all into the ground. I walked a lot, especially late at night, especially as my brain wore itself to pieces as well, worm-eaten and fissure-riddled. It seemed like the best available option. Given a choice between a long walk and a long fall, what would you choose? I chose the Manhattan Bridge in March, warmer than it would <strong>have</strong> been in February, with ice floes still packing the river below, but not as warm as April, when the air would <strong>have</strong> been as heavy and damp as exhaled breath. The bridge’s organic fence is extended upwards by a meter or more by a chain-link fence to discourage jumpers. I walked from Manhattan and Brooklyn without looking at it once, in a sort of fugue, driven by a furious determination to subsume my body and self in the act of crossing. I still remember how the lights along the bridge looked, their sodium glow, like riding in the passenger seat of a car late at night and counting the cat-eye blink of mile markers. At the next light, you can stand for a minute and catch your breath. At the next one after that, you can look at the horizon once, and only if you’re careful. And then, as I reached each light, I would push those goals back. Not this light, the next one; no, the one after that. If I stopped, I felt certain I might never start again. But I didn’t want the bridge to end, either, because then I would <strong>have</strong> no more distance to walk, and I would <strong>have</strong> to start thinking again. I always remember the same details from these walks: the sparse lit windows along Central Park West, the doormen ensconced in a yellow glow, and then me, wearing those same moto boots to shreds — in fact their soles were eroded down to the wood, at that point, so that I slipped sideways and off curbs at random intervals — and isn’t it funny that I remember what it looked like, <strong>where</strong> I was, but nothing about how I felt? I can call it up, if I try, but I can’t describe it — a stinging like the moment between a cruel joke and humiliating tears, maybe, or the first flush of sunburn, when the extent of the damage is not yet clear, or like the aftermath of a slap. There’s a poem: I <strong>have</strong> seen nearly every city from a rooftop without jumping. That’s what it was like, those moments when you stand at the edge of a drop and that old voice kicks up to whisper, But what if you flew? Icarus in worn-out boots. But there are worse analogies, I suppose, when you break it down for parts: the threadbare self, the widening gyre, and burning through all of it, indelible, the light. rowan morrison
“ring road” waverly sm