The Long Way Past Miller Bridge

Miller Bridge is my route home. Eight years, twice a day; I could drive it in my sleep and probably occasionally do.

That Friday I sat at the junction where you choose — left for the bridge, straight on for the long way through the valley, twenty minutes and two school zones slower — and my hands chose. I was signalling left; that is true and the woman behind me will attest to it, because she honked when the signal changed and I failed to go. Something leaned on me. There is no better verb. A weight against the left turn, bland and immovable, like a shut door in a dream.

I went straight on. I spent the whole valley road annoyed at myself, composing a text to my wife about needing more sleep, deciding the podcast had distracted me. Twenty minutes of self-diagnosis at forty through school zones.

My phone began going mad as I came up our street — the neighbourhood group first, then my wife, then everyone. A tanker had shed its coupling on Miller Bridge at rush hour, jack-knifed, and swept three cars against the parapet. The time stamps put it at almost exactly the minutes I would have been crossing; I have done that particular arithmetic more times than is healthy, and it always lands inside the same four-minute window.

The drivers survived, one after a long hospital stint. I did not know any of them. I have no claim to the event; I was not in it. That is precisely what I cannot digest — the door in my head shut before there was anything to be shut against, on the one evening in eight years it mattered.

I still take the bridge daily. But at that junction I hold the wheel a little loosely now, in case anything wants to lean.