The Field Beneath the Bridge
There was a field next to the railway bridge where I built a den. You had to wade through water and clamber over planks to reach the other side.
It wasn’t much. My den. A hollow in the bushes hidden from the paths, the road and the houses beyond. To anyone else it would have looked like an untidy patch of brambles. To me it was a room of my own.
I would take books there.
The trains passed overhead at irregular intervals, rattling across the bridge and shaking the air for a few seconds before fading into the distance. Between them there was only the sound of the river and the wind moving through the grass.
One day I found discarded needles hidden among the beer cans.
I remember crouching there, looking at them. They felt like evidence of another world. A world I didn’t understand or I wasn’t supposed to see.
The river ran beside the field.
The water was dark and strong. Along the banks there were patches of mud that looked solid until you stepped on them. Then they swallowed your feet whole. I spent hours watching the current move past, carrying leaves and branches away beneath the bridge and beyond the bend.
I often imagined following it.
The field felt like freedom. Home.
I would sit in my den with a book and listen to the world shifting around me. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend it wasn’t there. That it didn’t exsist. And neither did I.
I felt free and trapped at the same time.
