The Footbridge: a short story. This was a finalist for Witness Magazine's 2023 literary fiction award.
AKA the prequel to my published short story, "Pride." AKA the first chapter of a novel I started in 2003, revised into a short in 2022.
“There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you: ‘Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?’—Immediately, you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again, you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
New York, October 2003
“Let’s go to Vermont and get married,” Lin says. “So I can get U.S. citizenship.” As my fingers run past Woolf, past Dickinson, “People pay four to five thousand dollars now.”
I stop perusing the books in the cart outside the small bookshop, and, keeping my face expressionless, say to her, “Would people have to know about it?”
“Well, yes.”
“And how would your boyfriend feel about your having a wife?”
“It’s okay, guys like bisexuality.”
“Uh huh,” I say, forcing my glance back to Joyce, to Eliot.
Finally. After an afternoon’s worth of disconcertingly normal behavior on Lin’s part, she’s shown she didn’t completely disengage herself from me these past two years.
“Fine, I’ll find someone else,” she says.
I feel her turn away. “So soon?” I say. “I was all excited over my first proposal.”
And there I go again, unable to resist the way she tries to mask her earnestness.
Then again, Lin had me fooled all through tea.
I found her looking peeved on the bench outside Tea and Sympathy, the crowded little Greenwich Village fixture she’d picked. Her dimples didn’t emerge when she saw me walk up to her, trying to flash my best “I’m Em Chang, adore me” grin. And when I stepped in for a hug anyway, saying “hi” in my warmest voice, she stuck her arms out in such a way that she was almost pushing me away. Had she always felt so bony? She definitely didn’t used to hug me like that.
Should I have led with “I’m so sorry”?
She pulled away quickly from our “hug” and said “I put us on the list,” in that “We are so cool to live in New York” voice that everyone I know has picked up. “It’s very popular,” and then blah, blah, blah about how her British boyfriend had introduced her to it, how he knew so much about New York because he was older and had lived here a decade.
“How long have you been dating?” I asked, because I had to, like it was my line in the script for “British Boyfriend is the Best,” a movie definitely not coming to theatres near you.
“We met at a rave my senior year, he swept me off my feet, and we’ve been together ever since. Now we’re a boring, happy, domestic couple who stay at home.” Yep, definitely scripted.
I wondered how the script would read if I hadn’t run away.
Would she be this normal? She took me somewhere with a set menu, for Christ’s sake. College Lin would never have stomached such conformity. And then the one thing we could pick—the tea—she was like “oh yes, we must have Earl Grey, British Boyfriend introduced me to it, it’s the best because blah blah.”
I interrupted to tell her Earl Grey was my favorite from Cambridge, and instead of trying to guilt me about how she didn’t know I’d gone abroad because I’d stopped speaking to her by then, she moved straight to asking if I had a boyfriend. And not in that old “they may try, but you will always belong to me” way, but in a Boyfriends are the Greatest way. She even offered to set me up with someone, and showed me a picture of the guy on her camera phone.
At least she still liked the latest gadgets.
And at least I got one dimple out when I said “no thank you, way too metrosexual for me.”
“I did meet him through yoga,” she said, that old mischievousness shining through.
But then she asked about law school, as if she cared about my life outside of her, as if we were normal people, normal friends catching up. I told her it was boring and uninspiring and nothing like Yale. She rolled her eyes at the mention of our alma mater, but then smiled a little and said “You did love your classes.”
At her expense, she used to complain. She’d dance right in front of me when I was trying to read my philosophers. “But I am alive!” she’d say.
Yeah you were.
I guess a bit of old Lin came out when we talked about whether I’ll live downtown or uptown after I graduate. She insisted downtown was way more cool. I didn’t dispute that, but told her I didn’t want to smell stale beer all the time.
She laughed and put her teacup in front of my nose, her hand close to my mouth.
I sniffed and said, “stale beer.”
A hearty, literal “haha!”—finally louder than decorous—and as she sat back in her chair, “You should come downtown more often.”
But then, before I could delight in having unearthed College Lin, she immediately hedged. “There’s so much to do, so many people in New York. Seeing good friends every two weeks is enough.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
But inside, I wanted to cry, hearing Lin say this.
This was the girl who’d wanted every hour I could give her the year we were friends. She’d come up to me after my last class each day, waving the latest Minidisc of Japanese pop she’d made me. We’d meander across campus, talking, and then she’d sit by me wherever I chose to try to get some work done.
This was the girl who ate with me every night, who didn’t notice the guys ogling her, who dismissed them if they came up to us, who gazed at me like no one else was there, her eyes an adorable squint, her dimples deep as she teased me for my nightly bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Then she’d remind me, lips smacking in that rapid, cheerful Lin quintuplet, of the food we’d eat in Taipei and Beijing the next break.
This was the girl whose face would fall, who’d say, “Too bad your parents don’t live in Taipei anymore.”
“It’s just two weeks,” I’d say.
This was the girl who’d frown, unappeased.
This was the girl who said, “Two weeks is a long time.”
This was the girl who’d follow me to my room afterwards, who’d lie on my twin bed and ask me to join her, who’d stay as I made phone calls and wrote articles, who’d put her hand on my leg if I caved in and sat on the bed, who, when I ran off to the Yale Daily News building each night, stuck out her lips and said, “Do you really have to go?”
This was the girl who’d ICQ me as soon as I logged on when I got back to my room, who’d notice if I was later than usual, her petulance tangible if I said I’d stopped to talk to my roommates or with Brian after we turned in our articles. Brian, whom my parents said I should marry, whom my parents said was the best I could do.
This was the girl who’d call me, minutes later, saying, “it’s better to hear your voice.”
This was the girl who’d stay on the phone with me as I fell asleep reading.
This was the girl who’d call me every Sunday morning, weeping, begging me to come over as she crashed from taking Ecstasy the night before, who’d insist, if I asked her to call someone else because I was busy—“it has to be you. It has to be you, Em.”
This was the girl who’d smile when I arrived, tears drying as I sat down a few feet from where she lay in bed, pretending I didn’t see her patting the spot next to her.
“See? You were almost fine, you just needed ten more minutes,” I’d say.
This was the girl who’s say, “no, Em, it’s because you’re here.”
That was a better script.
But that was four years ago.
And today, by the time I realized she had saved me all the cucumber cream cheese sandwiches, I figured it was just her training as a 姐姐, an older sister. “I’m just taking care of you, like I do with my 妹妹,” she’d say when I’d devour the chocolate-covered gummy bears she’d bring me from the other end of campus.
I don’t want to be your little sister, I’d think.
But I never said it.
But it’d seemed true today. She had me convinced she had moved on, that she’d found love and balance, that I had wrongly tapped her in my impulsive, nostalgic desire for someone unafraid to be raw.
This Lin was cooked, I thought.
But you don’t ask your little sister to marry you.
I pluck Neruda’s love poems out from the cart and pay.
I read to her as we walk along West 10th.
She rolls her eyes when I sigh at “One word then, one smile, is enough.”
It has to be pretense. It has to be.
It wasn’t that long ago that she said to me, lying in my bed, practically begging, “I just want to find my soulmate—it doesn’t matter if it’s a guy or a girl.”
It wasn’t that long ago that when I pretended I didn’t hear her, that I was absorbed with whatever was on my computer, that she said, voice thick,
“Em.”
It wasn’t that long ago that my heart went against my screaming brain and made me turn to her.
It wasn’t that long ago that she looked at me, so intently, and repeated herself:
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a guy or a girl.”
At least, it wasn’t that long ago for me.
“You could live in that high rise right there,” she says. “Fewer bugs.”
I look, but don’t say anything.
“We could have brunch every Sunday,” she says.
I imagine sitting across from her every Sunday, sipping coffee, eating challah French toast. I can’t picture what she’s eating.
“You weren’t the best company for brunch,” I say. I practically had to carry her to her dining hall on Sundays, arriving just before it closed, my stomach growling. I’d sit her down and grab us both food. She’d barely eat anything, then put her head on the table, head tilted to watch me scarf down my pancakes, ready to get back to my articles, my papers, my reading.
“Touché,” she says. “Thanks for taking care of me.”
“I’m sorry I stopped,” I say, and I want to take her hand.
I’ve never held that hand. I’ve only ever felt her fingertips brush the top of mine while we talked.
I still feel the invisible trail of her fingertips today, four years later.
I still hear the sound of her sobs from that last night. I still remember how my hand shook as I held the phone to my ear, choking out the words, “I can’t do this anymore,” some line—some script—I’d heard on TV.
My real words remained unspoken.
I can’t be your soulmate. I can’t be your boyfriend.
I’m supposed to find a boyfriend, not be a boyfriend.
I remained silent. I let the mountains come between us.
My parents’ voices were louder in my head than her sobs in my ear.
I heard them as I declined her phone calls that week, as I clicked “invisible” on ICQ.
Outside my head, voices approved. “She was weird,” my roommates said. I became their full-time fifth wheel.
She didn’t show up after my classes. We never ran into each other. It was almost like she’d never existed.
Until I saw her, two years later, like a mirage, on a bus to the Last Chance Dance. My Last Chance Dance—she’d graduated the previous year. She was in town visiting the boys from her rave scene, the ones she didn’t call when she was upset, the ones who wouldn’t do because they weren’t me.
I’d stalked down the bus to her, drunk, oblivious to everyone else, seeing only that smile directed towards those boys.
“Lin!” I’d said.
She’d turned to me, and that smile had turned up infinite notches. “Em!” she’d said, giving me a hug.
I’d melted into her, that familiar warmth. “I’m so sorry,” I’d said.
“It’s okay,” she’d said. “You had a lot going on.”
“I’m so sorry,” I’d repeated, blubbering.
“It’s perfect,” she’d said. “It’s the Last Chance Dance. We’re getting another chance.”
But when we got to the dance, I’d heard the song I shared with a boy. A boy I’d thought was my soulmate since high school—a boy who I’d told Lin about, pretending her search for her soulmate had nothing to do with me. Never mind that he only called me in between girlfriends, that he hadn’t spoken a word to me after we finally hooked up in December.
For him, I’d walked away from Lin. Again.
He’d turned his back when he saw me. I’d left the dance, sobbing, left my last chance with both of them.
And then. Two years, five months later—three nights ago—I saw stormlin pop up on AOL Instant Messenger, like a dream.
“‘Storm’ is my favorite trance song,’” she’d said when we exchanged Screen Names the week we met. “And, you know. The storm within me.” She’d smiled, and I thought she was joking, until she started calling me during her dark moments. “You give me shelter from my storm, Em,” she’d said one afternoon, and then, laughing, she’d taken out a Bob Dylan CD from her bag and played the song on my stereo, lip-synching as she danced across my room.
Stormlin was never on AIM. We had switched to ICQ when it became the cool international thing to do.
I got back on AIM for tinalee97 last year, messaging her across the ConLaw classroom, trying to get that straight face to crack a little; I always laughed first, always suffered the Socratic repercussions. And it was always worth it to watch her turn her face, hide what I knew to be a smile behind her hand.
Three mornings ago, Tina gave our friend James unprecedented access to our secret enclave in her apartment. He sat in her chair, amused, listening to our easy half-sentences to each other as she flipped crêpes and I sprawled in my usual spot on her couch.
“You guys seem like lesbians,” he said as she handed him a plate.
I froze at that word.
But then, for a moment, I felt proud. He could see how, safely ensconced in her apartment, she was so different with me—smiling, casual, familiar.
But he’d pointed out the footbridge.
Turning back to the pan, back perfectly straight, she said, “Me? Maybe her.”
Pummeled by a torrential river, I remained silent.
That night, seeing stormlin online, it was like a salve.
I messaged her immediately.
thusspokeem: Lin!
Because I remembered what it was like to be wanted, to be needed, by a girl. Openly, unabashedly. Because it hadn’t been that long for me.
stormlin: Hi, Em. How have you been?
Oh, sick of containing myself, sick of defending my very essence, sick of trying to tease out the trapped beating heart of someone who casually assaults mine, sick of the façade that I am merely tolerated—
Missing you.
thusspokeem: Good! Can’t believe I caught you on AIM!
thusspokeem: Are you still in NY?
stormlin: Yup, randomly got on tonight. Yup, still in NY, still in the Village. Where are you nowadays?
thusspokeem: I’m at Columbia—last year of law school.
thusspokeem: Want to meet up?
And she said yes. Despite everything, because of everything.
The bitter scent of coffee wafts into my nose. I don’t take her hand, even as the sound of her sobbing four years ago echoes through me, even as I ache to be closer to her.
But I stop, right next to a line of people waiting to get into a café.
I look into her eyes, channel my regret.
“I’m really sorry I went away,” I repeat.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You were stressed. I was demanding.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t okay. But thanks for giving me another chance.”
“We’re older and wiser now,” she says. “And you seem more relaxed. Even though you’re in law school.” She puts on College Lin’s mock-confused look.
It’s like home.
“I’ve been pretty relaxed in law school—my brother never went. No summa cum laude footsteps to follow.”
I have more time for you now. I can give more now.
Though the calls from my parents continue. What happened to Brian? You need to be more feminine! You need to be sweeter! I’m trying, Ma.
Though not at this moment.
Lin nods. “I’m glad you get to take a break.”
“I’m glad I caught you on AIM,” I say.
“I never go on,” she says. “It was fate.” She smiles. Dimples.
“緣分,” I say, smiling back. Two people can have 緣分, a sort of spiritual destiny to be friends. Or more.
This is how we used to talk to each other.
“You should come to Central Park with me,” I say as we start walking again, leaving the café behind. We have no destination—we’re wandering, just how we both like it. “It’s so green, and quiet. Like stepping into another universe.”
Like how sometimes, when we were together, it was like we had our own space-time continuum, the hours flying by, dorm rooms, dining halls, New Haven forgotten.
Until the real world knocked on my brain, made me worry what my roommates would say when she left—“is she a lesbian?”—made me remember Ma’s fury upon discovering that letter from Suyin in high school—“it’s like a love letter!”—made me remember my father and brother each sitting me down—“your life will be easier if you’re with men”—made me remember my deadlines and ambitions—made me abandon Lin when she—more than anyone—needed me, wanted me.
Made me, made me, made me. Nobody, nothing “made me” do anything.
Lin puts a hand on my shoulder. “You okay? Take a breath?”
My words come out snide: “Is that part of the boho yoga stuff you’re learning?”
“Yes,” she says, her face closing up, her hand coming off my shoulder.
I feel its absence. Just as, I’m realizing now, I felt its absence on my leg all afternoon, because 25-year-old Lin—or maybe it’s New York Lin, or maybe it’s British Boyfriend Lin—no longer puts her hand on my leg while we talk.
I stop walking. Before her next step lands, she stops too.
I take a breath.
“A deep one. Through your nose. From your belly,” she says.
In the middle of Greenwich Avenue, as cars honk and people power walk around us, I put my hands on my belly. I take a deep breath through my nose. We’re an island, entire of itself.
“Breathe out slowly.”
Our eyes are locked. I breathe out slowly. She joins my exhale.
“Better?” Her voice is gentle. I’ve never heard it like that.
“Yes.”
We resume walking. “So, Central Park is another universe?” she says.
I nod. “A multiverse, really. There’s the Ramble, which you stumble into, and then it’s just wild, like you’re in a forest. Unpredictable, no matter how often I go.”
A bit like you.
“The fall leaves are gorgeous there,” I continue. “Though these aren’t bad either,” I say, pointing at the sudden array of trees around us.
“Jefferson Market Garden,” she says with a smile.
As one, we admire the colors. We did this in New Haven too, the one fall we had together.
We take a seat on a bench.
“In the spring, I have a favorite flowering tree in the Park,” I say. “Near the Great Lawn. I love lying under it to read. There are so many flowers, it’s all I see when I look up.”
“I loved the sakura in Taiwan and Japan,” she says. “I sat under them to study.”
I imagine a young Lin under a cherry blossom tree. I see her dancing, though. All those hours we spent together, I never once saw her reading for class.
She looks at me and laughs. “You can’t imagine me studying? How do you think I got into Yale?” she says, putting on a pompous voice.
I put my hands together at my chest and bow repeatedly, murmuring, “道歉, 道歉,” formally apologizing. She laughs even harder, and my eyes peek up to catch a glimpse of her dimples.
“好了好了,” she says—okay okay—and I stop bowing, a smile stretching my cheeks. Lin speaking Taiwanese Mandarin—it’s like my favorite song came back on the radio after four years.
“And what are you reading under the flowering tree?” she asks. “Supreme Court cases?”
I shake my head. “No way. Central Park is my oasis. I can’t bring my law stuff there. I’m rereading Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.” To better quote them to Tina. To show her “emotional” can be intelligent too.
“You still like the passionate stuff,” Lin says.
I nod. I wave the Neruda book at her. She smiles.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
“Veronika Decides to Die,” she says.
An old fear grips me. Saturday nights, Sunday mornings until she called.
I take a breath. I’m not running away this time. “Lin. You’re not thinking of—you’re not gonna—you’re okay?”
She smiles at me, one I haven’t seen before, an I’ve-seen-too-much-smile. “You’re still sweet, aren’t you. It’s just a book.”
“You can call me anytime,” I say. “Or message me. I can get back on ICQ if you want.”
“Still sweet,” she says quietly, as if to herself. Then, looking at me, she makes a little happy gesture with her hands, one that reminds me of the way she danced.
Her smile was ethereal when she danced, eyes closed, head to the sky, arms outstretched, as if she were somewhere else, somewhere with a million brilliant colors at once, somewhere she could literally float on the beat.
The one night I went to one of her raves and gently patted her shoulder, her ethereal smile converted to raw, unbridled joy, warmth emanating from her as if she were the sun. But better, because she was shining for me, and me alone, and because I could look right at her, at that smile, at those dimples, so deep that they could house my secret heart, buried underneath so much pressure, so much Sisyphean striving to belong.
Her dimples don’t surface in the I’ve-seen-too-much smile.
“What other parts of Central Park do you like?” she asks, putting her hands down.
She’s trying to change the subject. But maybe Central Park could be her shelter from the storms she’s facing in New York.
“The huge expanses of grass. The Great Lawn, and—closer to you—Sheep Meadow. Baaaa!” I bleat, hoping to evince a real smile.
She laughs.
“Are you one with the herd now, Emily Chang?”
A Nietzsche reference.
She remembers.
The dimples always came out when I talked about Nietzsche.
I shake my head. “Never.”
“Good.” She kicks at the brick path under our feet, and says, “I wouldn’t mind rolling in some luscious grass.”
I smile. College Lin talked like that all the time. Let’s walk under the canopies of red and yellow and listen for the crunch of leaves under our feet, Em. Let’s dance as the fresh white snow falls on our heads, Em. It’s so cold and rainy, Em—come get cozy under my soft warm blanket.
I never got under the blanket with her. I never acknowledged her hand on her leg, never put my hand on her hand.
“You should come,” I repeat.
“I don’t go north of 14th,” she says. Back to the script.
“Not even for your wife?” Off-script.
She laughs. “Maybe for my wife.”
I beam. She grins, looks away.
I pull Neruda back out, read to her.
“But if each day, each hour you feel
that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness
if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me
ah my love, ah my own
in me all that fire is repeated
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten
my love feeds on your love, beloved and as long as you live
it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.”
My hand that’s holding the book goes to my heart. In me, nothing is extinguished or forgotten. I want to repeat it, slowly, looking her in the eyes. But I don’t.
This time, she doesn’t roll her eyes.
It’s unnaturally quiet, like the city stopped for the poem.
“You should head back up now,” she says, breaking the silence. “Didn’t you say you needed to be back by six?”
Immediately, you did not want anymore. Mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us.
“I’ll walk you to the stop,” she says, getting up.
“Do you want to come to the party?” I ask.
“No thanks,” she says.
“You don’t want to meet my friends?” God I sound pathetic. When has Lin ever wanted to meet my friends? We’re an island. We’re our own space-time continuum.
“Maybe one at a time,” she says. “Not at a party.”
“It’s just two of them bartending with me,” I say.
“Paul and I are having dinner,” she says. British Fucking Boyfriend. Hello, real world 2003.
I say nothing as we walk the remaining half block to the station.
She wraps me in her arms at the stairs. A real hug, our chests pressed together.
I breathe her in. Her clothes smell different, but her hair, her skin, the same.
“Good seeing you,” she says, her voice steady at my ear.
“You too,” I say.
She lets go.
I run down the stairs, because I’m a cool New Yorker, and we hurry places, because like she said, there’s so much to do, so many people to see.
My tears fall at the turnstile.
I hug the pole as the car takes me away from her, back uptown.