My Early Days in China - The Horror Sky Bridge
There was one bridge frequently appeared in my dream, uninvited. Whenever I tried to cross it, I always dropped off it and got myself killed. Sometimes the bridge was cut off in two, people on the other side were cheering me up, and I jumped following the run-up, and I fell and died. Sometimes I walked on the bridge and next step my foot sensed nothing but gravity, and I fell and died.
I was surprised how creative my subconscious was. There were so many ways to get myself killed with the bridge. It was like living inside the movie Final Destination, full of surprise to kill you. It was a constant nightmare.
The bridge was real, you can't Google it, but local people called it the Sky Bridge.
The Sky Bridge (天桥, pronounced as "Tian qiao" in Chinese), located in Laodaokou (老道口), Shenyang, Northeast China, was one road that we must pass everyday to work, school and basically anywhere to the city. I spent my early life there, from 2 to 9. For a kid magically everything scaled bigger than it was supposed to be, the Sky Bridge was like it really meant to connect to the sky, so giant that it was the symbol of my whole childhood.
The bridge, opened in 1912, consisted of a 5 meters wide main road and two 2 meters wide sidewalks, overall about 200 meters long. Below the bridge were a dozen railways, connecting the city to Beijing and other parts of China.
My mom used to put me onto the backseat of her bicycle and rode across the bridge to drop off me to school. "I couldn't ride my bicycle on the bridge at first, I was so scared", my mom recalled, "I could only hold the handle of the bridge, and pushed myself forward one step at a time." I forgot how tall it was, but I guess it was high enough to make an adult shake his/her legs. And apparently I was too small to fear the height, I wish I could possess that ability till today.
My mom overcame that fear soon. "Everybody was no problem, and they looked at me as if I was an alien. I knew I need to get used to it." When life pushes you to the edge, you acquire whatever ability to survive.
By the year I went to elementary school, the bridge was already too old like an ancient tree, I started to notice the twisted scars. The wood covered in the surface started to fall apart, more and more holes were revealed that you could literally see trains traveling beneath your feet - least thing you would expect from peeking through a hole. When a car drove through, the entire bridge vibrated. I can't stop thinking that why the thought never occurred to me at that time - if I fall from the bridge, I'm not just gonna die because of the height, I could also be hit by a fast running train, die twice in a single try, not as fun as "buy one get one free" Domino Pizza.
One day after school, several of my friends and I were heading my home to play console games. They were supposed to be "tough guys" in the school, at least that was how they wanted to be pictured. One or two of them already started to show some of the "bully" traits, but anyway, we were good friends. So we arrived at the bridge, only to notice there were no one following me after I took several steps on it. "Do... do you cross this bridge everyday?", one friend asked in his shaking voice, another was kneeling down and nearly bursting into tears, mumbling "I can't do this... I can't do this..."
That was a shocking moment to me. You know, I had been walking across the bridge for 4 years then, if not counting the year I was still in a baby car. No matter how old or how broken that bridge was, I was so used to it, so were my family and other local people. It was just one thing on our way to lives. To others, however, that was a utterly shattered bridge that no one would take it as bravery to walk across it.
A few years later, my family had moved to another place, I decided to revisit the Sky Bridge in a summer vacation of junior high school or high school I forgot, and guess what? I couldn't even move a single step onto the bridge, as if that one step would take my life eternally. By the time the sidewalks were shutdown completely because of the unfixable damage, and no cars were allowed on the bridge either. Trains running below filled in the sights of increased scar-holes, as if they were part of the textures of it, and yet people were still there, still walking across it, some were even selling a range of merchandise, completely at ease. In the end, I took another route like my "tough" friends did, who I mocked as "pussy" back in the day. It was that experience triggered my nightmare of falling down the bridge, and had haunted me my entire 20s.
Time passed. I had already left the city for more than 10 years, one day I went back to my hometown and wanted to give it another try, or just to confirm if my horrified experience was real or a mere fantasy. Yet I couldn't find a single piece of metal or wood, the Sky Bridge was completely gone, and people started to refer to it as the "Old Bridge".
