I am just a pile of pieces.
Big red beams, lying flat in the mud. Bolts in buckets. Cables coiled up like sleeping snakes.
I don't know what I'm supposed to be yet.
Then one morning, a woman in a yellow hard hat kneels down and unrolls a giant paper across my biggest beam. She smooths it flat with both hands.
"Good morning, Bridge," she says.
Her name is Rosa. She drew me before I was real.
Rosa's drawing shows something tall. Something wide. Something that goes from one side of the river all the way to the other side.
"That's me?" I think.
I don't feel like that. I feel like a mess.
But then come the trucks.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
A man named Earl drives the big crane. He talks to me too. "Easy now," he says, and he lifts my first beam up — UP — and I feel the sky for the very first time.
Oh.
Oh, the sky is everywhere.
Earl swings me out over the water. The river is brown and wide and it doesn't care about anything. Wind pushes at me. I wobble.
"Steady, steady," Earl says.
He sets me down on two big stone towers, one on each side. And I hold on tight.
Now come more workers. So many boots! So many hands!
A woman named June climbs right up on top of me. She is not afraid of anything. She walks across my beams like they are sidewalks. She carries a heavy bag of bolts on her hip.
CLANG. She drops one.
It bounces off my beam, hits another beam — PING — hits Earl's hard hat — BONK — and lands right in his coffee cup.
PLOP.
Everyone laughs. Earl looks in his cup and shakes his head. "That's my lunch now," he says.
June hollers down, "Sorry, Earl!"
She is not very sorry. I can tell because she is grinning.
One by one, June bolts my pieces together. Every bolt she tightens makes me feel more like one thing instead of many things. I stop rattling. I stop wobbling.
I start to hum.
Days go by. Then weeks.
A young man named Marco paints me red. Bright, bright red. He starts at one end and works all the way across, and everywhere his brush touches, I wake up.
I didn't know I had a color.
I didn't know a color could feel like a name.
Marco sings while he paints. He sings the same song every day, and I learn it in my beams. When the wind blows through my cables at night, I almost sing it back.
Then one morning, everything is quiet.
No cranes. No trucks. No BEEP BEEP BEEP.
Rosa comes back. She puts her hand flat on my railing, the way you touch something you missed. Earl is there. June is there. Marco is there, with red paint still on his shoes.
They all look at me.
I am not a pile of pieces anymore.
I am wide and strong and bright red and I go from one side of the river all the way to the other side, just like Rosa's drawing.
A little girl on a bicycle rides up to my edge. She stops. She looks across.
"Can I go?" she asks.
"You can go," Rosa says.
The little girl pushes off. Her wheels hum against me. I hold her up — every bolt, every beam, every cable holds her up — and she rides all the way across, her legs pumping, the wind in her hair, the river shining below like it finally, finally cares about something.
I am the Bridge.
And I know every name that built me.
