The memories form a bridge, but the boards are loose. If I step in the wrong place, my ankle twists. I fall. And then everything comes crashing down.

Drew once wrote a poem about bridges. He gave me a copy of it, published in his university’s literary journal: a slim volume with a dark red cover. I think it was the year we first met at CTY, the “Center for Talented Youth” - a summer program where precocious middle and high school kids take college-level courses at local campuses. I attended from ages 13-16, to study writing in Central Pennsylvania. Drew was an RA in one of the boys’ dorms there. In the past, he had been a CTY student himself.

In the poem, Drew described standing on a bridge in the middle of the night in his hometown of Pittsburgh, drinking Four Roses whiskey. Or maybe he was spitting it out over the edge, onto unsuspecting traffic? Or had he broken the bottle, shards of glass disappearing in the dark, the liquid pooling like blood at his feet? And what bridge was it anyway? Wasn’t its name the poem’s title? “____ Bridge, 3AM”?

I don’t know. After years of fingering the curling, dog-eared pages, I lost the journal.

A Google search now yields the names of no fewer than 446 Pittsburgh bridges. Names like Andy Warhol, Rachel Carson, West End, Birmingham, Hot Metal.

It also yields Drew’s name, though not with any poetry attached. Just some scattered social media posts, music reviews, academic papers.

***

The therapist I currently see in a little cottage in Berkeley that is slowly being consumed by purple wisteria vines (closest bridge names: Bay and Richmond) says she thinks “issues of consent are in the air.” Brett Kavanaugh has just been confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, and she says a lot of women are bringing up old sexual encounters, turning over old stones.

“Well, this is nothing like that,” I tell her. “Drew was just another one of those older guys I always had crushes on. And really not even that much older. When we met, he was only 19. That’s not even an adult.”

Yet, images rise: A small wooden chair at the computer desk in my mother’s house, in the room at the top of the stairs - the makeshift office where my father wrote two books before dying of a heart attack, suddenly, in the middle of the night, the year before I first met Drew - the same unforgiving chair that sat underneath me, numbing my lower body while I chatted with him into the dawn on AOL Instant Messenger on the family Apple computer in high school. And the red plaid bondage pants that I wore the day we met at Punk Rock Appreciation Hour, one of the CTY social activities, hosted by Drew and some other RA whose name I don’t recall because he treated me like a child. Because he didn’t write poetry. Because he wasn’t dangerous.

***

The summer after my father died, 1998, I discovered punk rock through a friend's cousin - an older girl with hairy armpits and a septum ring. In her room, she played vinyl records for me and my friend that had been mail-ordered from obscure labels. The records roared to life when the needle hit them: drummers pounding at breakneck speeds, singers screaming and wailing with an intensity I had never heard before.

At home, it was always quiet, and my room smelled like funeral flowers, sickly sweet. My mother was attempting a practice of listening to a 10-minute segment of each of my father’s record albums, in alphabetical order, one per day. He had an extensive record collection that contained primarily obscure British folk revival music - Steeleye Span, Martin Carthy, the Watersons, Mary Black. As a child, I loved the melodies of these artists and others: Phil Ochs, Nanci Griffith. But now, I watched as if from outer space as my mother mechanically lined up the record albums’ spines in the “correct” order, attempting to contain her private grief within the neat corners of each cardboard record sleeve.

Punk rock, on the other hand, was an icy-hot cacophony, guitars and drums, frenzied, rising up, propelling me, making me reckless. I began reading every book about the history of punk I found at the library, and buying every record, CD, and tape I could get my hands on, especially if the bands had women in them: Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, X-Ray Spex. Every night, I fell asleep listening to Pretty On the Inside by Hole at maximum volume on my headphones, a churning, sonic deluge punctuated with Courtney’ Love’s guttural screams - like a pot of boiling water poured over me. I needed something like this to make me feel my edges, to make me feel.

The moment I saw “Punk Rock Appreciation Hour” listed on the CTY social activity schedule, I felt it was meant for my eyes alone. And that’s how I felt about Drew’s face, too. As soon as I walked into the room and laid eyes on him - Hot Metal. As if we were tethered by an invisible rope that seemed to originate just under my ribcage and stretch out toward his body: slim, sturdy chest, muscular arms displayed prominently in a white tank top, curly dark hair with a hint of too much grease, slight stubble, grin, and startling blue eyes.

As I walked toward him that first day, age 14, an ignition: the sound of a gas stove lighting, the soft static “shhh” that breaks the silence and lets you know the flame has caught.

 ***

I don’t remember anything else about that first day - the image of him has eclipsed everything else. But I do know that on the second day of Punk Rock Appreciation Hour, I wore a black dress I got at Goodwill that flared out below the hips and ended well before hitting my knees. Underneath, I wore a red lace bra that peeked out on top of my breasts.

I tracked Drew’s eyes to see if they looked my body up and down. They did.

I sat next to him, our knees agonizingly close together, paging through my giant Case Logic CD book. I was sure my heartbeat was audible as he pointed out certain CDs, nodding approvingly, ignoring others. Suddenly he stopped. “Suicide?” he asked. “This is like, the band Suicide, as in from the 70s?”

“Yeah.”

“As in, like with synthesizers and stuff…like Alan Vega’s band?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding, “Yeah. Synthesizers. Big Sunglasses. Suicide.”

“Wow!” he said, and he looked at me again, “I don’t know anyone else who has this kind of stuff.”

Drew told me he studied literature at a university in Chicago. He worked in a factory in Pittsburgh during the summers, staying with his mother and siblings. He wrote poetry and competed in boxing competitions. I told him I wanted to be a poet too. At least a writer. Or a rockstar.

After I went home, I wrote him letters. In carefully printed pink gel pen, I detailed my thoughts about existence, philosophy, music, and literature. I don’t know how I got his address. Did he give it to me or was there a group address list? Glenwood. Fort Pitt. Panhandle. I read and re-read his poem in the literary journal and the note he’d written in my yearbook that ended with something like “keep rockin’!” The note in the yearbook bugged me. It felt too casual, too friendly. I was sure there was much more than friendship between us.

“I don’t know how we started talking,” I say to the therapist. “I don’t remember getting letters back. But I know I saw him at CTY at least for two years, maybe three. And then in my junior year, we got the Internet at home and that’s when it all really began.”

***

But I know that Drew must have told me, even before my family got the Internet, about his “fetish” for hearing people talk about masturbation. I know because in one of my memories I’m wearing the fuzzy, hot pink leopard print pants that I got at Hot Topic in the 10th grade, 1999, and I only wore them that year. Does that mean he told me about this in person? The thought creates a sense of vertigo, as if I’m spinning over a valley filled with sharp, slippery rocks. I guess the reason Pittsburgh has so many bridges (according to Wikipedia) is the “uneven terrain” - gorges, ravines, rivers. Brilliant Cutoff Viaduct of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

I always thought nothing “inappropriate” happened between me and Drew except online. Oh, and on the phone. I keep telling my therapist “but nothing really happened. And anyway, whatever did…it was later on, after, when I was older. But it was nothing. I mean, it was something, I guess. I mean, I started it.”

***

There was a movie night scheduled at CTY. The movie was “Freaks.” Something else referenced in punk rock lore, since the Ramones’ famous refrain “gabba gabba hey!” was apparently taken from this movie.

I knew that Drew would be the RA supervising this activity. I’d gotten skilled at predicting when and where he would turn up.

I wore the pink leopard pants. I could hardly breathe as I imagined how I would tell him “they’re fuzzy! You can touch them!” and at last he’d have an excuse to lay his hand against my thigh for a brief, exquisite moment that would render my entire life up to this point worthwhile.

We sat next to each other in the back of the room as the movie played. I could feel his knee pressing against mine and, yes, his hand occasionally brushed the fur of my pants and seemed to linger. In the dark, I felt we could be more honest about our feelings. I felt set apart from the other students: older, exceptional. I had walked beside Drew to the event, instead of behind him; we talked about his college classes, the leaves on the trees were changing color, the sky was blue and cloudless. (Glenwood! Wabash! How could the leaves change color in August?)

I had never been kissed by a boy.

After the movie was over someone put on an episode of The Simpsons that included a joke about masturbation. I sat rigid, with a feeling in my stomach like rocking in the bottom of a boat.

I glanced at Drew out of the corner of my eye, wondering how he would react, given what I knew about him. He laughed loudly and slapped his hand against his thigh, shifting in his seat so his leg pressed mine even more.

Later, in my empty dorm room, I held the image of Drew in my mind, the feeling of his leg against mine, and my hands traveled over my body while a swirling, aching feeling began to build, like the off-kilter chords of a Sonic Youth song. The feeling spread from head to toe and finally released me back down into the late summer heat and sleep.

***

In my Junior year of high school, “the year 2000” everybody calls it, the family computer finally has an internet connection.

In long AIM conversations, in the room at the top of the stairs in my mother’s house, I make sure Drew knows I’m no longer a virgin and that I’m 16 now.

I tease. I talk about sex, the diaries of Anais Nin, poetry, Sartre, college applications. Drew dismisses my love of Sartre (who is “shriveled” and “joyless,” in his estimation), asks me detailed questions about my boyfriend, J., a guitarist in a local punk band, our sex life, and the parties and shows we go to.

“You know,” I finally write to him one night, “I had such a huge crush on you last summer at CTY.”

“What? Me?” he writes.

ME: “Yeah. I was glad I had my own private dorm room …”

HIM: “Did you masturbate thinking about me?”

ME: “Yes”

HIM: “Well…What would you have done if you got me alone?”

I feel like the time I fell off the swing set as a child and my dad explained I had “had the wind knocked out of me.” I am suddenly unsure of myself.

I don’t quite understand what’s happening until, in response to my questions about if he is ever going to come visit me, he says,

“I’d book a ticket now if I had both hands free.”

Once I understand (this is it! What I wanted! In a way, we are having sex right now!), I try reaching down to touch myself. But my body doesn’t respond at all. The wooden chair feels cold and hard underneath me.

Emptiness spreads in my chest, quickly followed by a kind of desperation that I convert to heat, forcibly mold into joy. I try to wait an appropriate amount of time before telling him I’ve finished.

“God,” he says, “I need a towel.”

***

During this year, when my boyfriend J. and I drive to punk shows in Philadelphia, I sometimes make a wrong turn and end up on the entrance ramp for the Ben Franklin Bridge, headed for New Jersey. This happens more than once. In fact, it happens a lot. I get so mad, because there are usually no exits once you are on a bridge. At least, not until you get to the other side.

But by then, you’re somewhere else.

***

Senior year, I’m sure of it this time, I write all year long, and I send Drew my writing: poems, stories. Journal entries. He seems impressed, but the love poems make him nervous.

Once I tell him outright: “I’m in love with you.”

He replies, “Don’t be. I’m a hack. You’re no hack. You’re the real thing.”

I write this down in my journal and immediately dismiss it as bullshit. But my stomach and throat ache with swallowed tears.

He has become tied in my mind with the idea of myself as an Artist, someone with a purpose, a calling — someone, above all, to be taken seriously. I imagine we would travel Europe together, waking in the morning to eat croissants and drink milky coffee on hotel verandas. We’d critique each other’s work and serve as each other’s muses. The images whisk me away from my real life and deposit me in a dream: we’d make love on faded red velvet in Vienna, I’d wear ripped satin and trashy lace, he’d wear leather with cold metal chains. I tell him all this and “Vienna” becomes a shared symbol for us. At least, I think it does.

***

“What are you wearing?” Drew asks me over the phone. His voice sounds raspy, rougher and lower than usual.

At 17, in 2002, I’ve moved out of my mom’s house and to a dorm in New York City, where I’m in college. It’s the beginning of my first semester: after I’ve left home, but before I’ve really arrived anywhere, touched down.

I’m talking to Drew on an almond colored plastic phone with a curved receiver and a long cord, from my loft bed in a building above Union Square. It’s the middle of the night, but my roommate is never home because she has friends with an apartment in the city.

“Well…sweatpants,” I say. I’m irritated. I’d wanted to talk about planning a visit for winter break now that I don’t have to live by my mom’s dumb rules anymore. Instead he says, “well, tell me more about these sweatpants.”

“Ok well they have a little stripe down the side…”

“Tell me about all the different ways that you masturbate.” The rough voice again. “Do you put your fingers inside of yourself? Or do you mostly touch your clit?”

I draw a breath.

I want to give him something and think, this isn’t much, really, to give. I can do this. I want him to like me. I need it. I am almost destroyed by the need.

“Well, it depends. Sometimes I do one, sometimes the other. They feel different.”

I hear him breathing, moaning, hot in my ear through the receiver. I hear the slap of his hand on his body. “You’re not like other girls. You’re extraordinary.” The sounds peak, slow and stop.

I have nowhere to hide. He can hear me this time. I try to focus. I keep going. It takes a long time. At one point, I accidentally hang up and am shocked that he immediately calls back. Finally, I orgasm, alone in my loft bed. It’s 4AM.

“I’m hard again just listening to you.” He groans and his voice sounds like it is coming from even farther away than it actually is: “I’m thinking about you sucking me right now. How good it would feel. How sexy you’d look doing it.” The sounds begin again.

The sun starts coming up and I’m late to my French class, wearing a gray corduroy skirt, black fuzzy sweater, and pink lace underwear.

***

“I wanted it,” I keep telling my therapist, “I wanted it.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know.” She’s looking down at her lap, then looking up into my eyes from under her curls.

“You wanted something,” she says finally.

***

Still not old enough to legally drink but drunk on White Russians in Union Square, stumbling around with some other girls from the dorm, I’m telling someone I just met about Drew and how I can’t seem to get him to nail down plans to see me in person.

“You should call him!” she says.

She  hands me her cell phone. I pull my Moleskine notebook out of my purse where I have the number of his mom’s house in Pittsburgh, where he is right now, written down. I dial the number.

His mom answers. “Is Drew there?” I say.

“He’s taking a nap,” she says, “he just got home from work. Who is this? Is this Lizzie?”

I hang up the phone, my face flaming. I imagine “Lizzie” as some Irish girl with braids and a perfect body. Like me, but better. Chosen.

***

And still: at my mother’s house in Pennsylvania over winter break, that first year of college, I’m sitting in my old bedroom, looking up ways to travel to Chicago by Greyhound bus. The phone number Drew gave me (the one we talked on when he told me I was extraordinary) is a landline in his dorm. When I call, someone else answers.

“Is Drew there?”

“Yeah, hold on.”

There is noise in the background, girls’ voices and bottles or glasses clinking.

“I’m pretty drunk,” he says.

I gather my courage and bring up the visit.

“It’s just not a good time,” he says, “yeah, you know, with finals and everything it’s just … I can’t really focus, I don’t know right now.” He hangs up.

I walk downstairs. I walk out the front door, the one I waited at for the ambulance to arrive the night my father died, the one that I entered nearly every day and night of my life during all those years of CTY and highschool. I light a cigarette.

My grandmother is visiting us for the holidays this year, and the power will go out for five days, leaving us to read books by candlelight and shiver next to the fire. I’ll read One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I won’t speak to Drew again. I will become someone else, but not in the way I envisioned.

Without warning, I lean over and vomit into a snowdrift, startled by the steam that rises.

***

As I finish this writing, my Google search for Drew’s name yields one more result.

It’s a song he wrote and recorded, posted online several years ago. I click “play.” I feel dizzy and sick, but his voice gets inside my head and won’t let go.

He’s been dreaming too much, he says, over the hollow sound of guitars, a descending riff. It’s late-night, he’s wandering the town, searching.

His voice lazily enunciates the words, describing visions of young girls and grand rooms, decadent cities, places you can never go again.

Across the river, I see those drunken lights, he slurs, and his voice is doused in reverb, an image clothed in Vaseline, trying to carry something or someone across space and time:

But that old bridge is rusted through.