“I just didn’t feel he listened to me,” she said, looking out the window onto Clement Street.
He nodded, his pristine head, clear of all hair but young and sexy and beckoning its way to her.
“Maybe it was me. Maybe it wasn’t the right time to tell him all I was feeling, or he wasn’t the right one to listen.” She returned her face towards her lunch companion.
This was the conversation in front of my corner seat at Indonesia Java Restaurant in the Richmond, reminding me that even in faux Indonesia, we all are suffering of mind of the same trials for love.
Little did I know when I was passing up the glory of Toy Boat Dessert Café light fare, I’d be getting more beef than what was on the menu.
I was famished.
I had just finished walking across the Golden Gate Bridge on a stunningly clear November day – 20 degrees warmer than the August date when I last attempted this and not a hint of fog in the sky. The red gold steel beams struck out gorgeous and grand to the sky.
To tackle a walk across that bridge – 1.7 miles across, nearly 4 miles round trip – was on my list of challenges. I held it as a rite of passage, to mark for certain the initiation that made me purely of this land. I had great trails across the state to cover, walking amongst forests of bears and redwoods and through the desert valleys, but it was this – this ability to master a crossing of the landmark of my new home that I held high above the rest.
The reason I hadn’t been able to accomplish this feat before was because I was always fogged out. Walking across the bridge in such density where you could taste the fog seemed purposeless – I wouldn’t know where I was walking, anyway, and I wanted (for all my fear) to catch a sense of the full span of the red steel linking the disparate land and water and people.
Its a high rise above the blue green bay, at the mouth of the Pacific, near a fault line begging to break off the continental shelf with the next grandiose tremor, that also had me frightened. Had I been worried about descending into the depths of shark filled waters, joining the thousands of jumpers over the years to that powerful spot where suicide’s enticed by its beauty? I may have been less afraid of the “what ifs” than of my own soul’s recent sinking into questioning its worth and grounding, eager for a bridge to fly from.
That day, I awoke to gray and rain that wanted to thwart my excursion to the beach. As the sun peeked out, I made a sharp turn towards the bridge, leaving me no choice but to confront the child inside. I walked confidently to its steps, so fast that I couldn’t look down or pause to think about what I was doing.
When I got there, I found that aside from the sharp vibrating I felt as the traffic roared by (and only if I stood perfectly still), it wasn’t frightening at all. It was a road, plain and simple, a road I’d taken a thousand times before in a thousand different places. A road I could master. With a view only evident if I paused to appreciate – same as any ride.
I took moments to raise my head to the steel beams above me – towering to the invisible heavens as there was not a cloud or an indicator to mark where the sky ended and the heavens or cosmos began. That they still stand, nearly a hundred years later, is an engineering marvel. It gave me a twinge more backbone for myself.
“There is hope,” the small square sign said, in its white scrawl on blue matte. It offered the number to a crisis hotline. It caused me to look down.
“Jumping from the bridge could be fatal and tragic,” another small square insisted, black lettering on a white background.
I looked down again. Interestingly, it didn’t look so far down. It didn’t look like the grand anything it had seemed from afar all this time. It looked…doable. One could land, maybe even swim over. Dive and enjoy the drop.
Historical facts aren’t in agreement – there is a 99% fatality rate from jumping off this bridge, the world’s most popular beacon for this. There’s been a fight to get a suicide barrier up, to no success yet. You’d think my home would want to be a beacon for beauty and freedom and spice – not for its draw into the abyss.
Perhaps that’s an underlying freedom supported here as well…
I look down again. It isn’t menacing – not the bridge, not the view of the drop. I think again of the recent circumstances that have brought me to a zillionth of the edge of sadness I can imagine those searching for an end are facing.
And I realize that instead of searching for whether I’m right or wrong about it, I should stop giving any issue that takes me to that edge any real estate at all. In my thoughts, in my life. It doesn’t matter to search for an answer. It only matters to rid it from my life – not rid my life from it.
Back at Indonesia, I turned my attention to the mustard flavored lettuce, the peppers and beef, the rice and tea that I was ingesting with a fury. Conquering a round trip on the Bridge had charged my appetite.
I slurped and listened, slurped and listened. My heart eased on me a little as the two continued their search for meaning amongst past loves. It was a conversation of great intimacy, shared easily in a restaurant that held only those two, the owner, the cook, and myself. Their tone and volume was normal and true, as they tossed the pieces in the air and tried to help one another sort it out as the pieces landed. I was blessed for the reminder that we’re all quietly searching – hoping for nodding empathy on the other end, to help us race from the pull of the blue green abyss.
Two girls stopped outside my window, a bustle of color and casual Saturday air, eyeing my meal. I smiled and nodded them in: Come in, come in.
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