Eric and Melissa held on the handles, their eyes lazily resting on each other, but not exactly looking at one another. The train eased on comfortably attached to the side of the Williamsburg Bridge. It was, to be sure, the ugliest bridge that crossed the East River and was bookended by some of the ugliest part of both boroughs.
It wouldn’t be true to say the two of them met because of the bridge, or even on it, but it had helped. The strike had done it, several years ago during an equally cold December, the train workers had become fed up with something and stranded hundreds of young people at each others apartments. The first picture this couple had ever took together had them standing in a crowd of disgruntled people on the Bridge, smiling, laughing even; on the photo’s back was the inscription: ‘Walking to work with a few thousand friends’. It had been attached to their (old) refrigerator, but Melissa accidentally threw the picture out this morning as they emptied their (formerly) shared apartment, not that either one of them would have asked to keep it. But the better moments of those three wonderful days didn’t exist on photo anyway. Coming home that same evening, on the same bridge, they’d ran across it quickly, like a race, while he yelled ‘Stroika!’—which he thought was the Russian word for ‘strike’. And they were New Yorkers then, not kids from the Jersey suburbs; the city had dealt them shit and they’d dealt with it because it was their city.
They’d both written a thousand articles, essays, and stories about the social significance of that three-day period and they both been rejected by a thousand magazine, newspapers, and websites. She tried to make a documentary about it , but quickly gave up on the nameless project. Still, as they train moved past the bridge, he found himself involuntarily speaking the word ‘Stroika’.
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