SPLENDOR ON THE HURSTVIEW BRIDGE

Me and that bridge, the Hurstview bridge that passes over 183, we go a long way back. I hear they are tearing it down next week to widen the freeway.

See, when I was 16 I had this pretty little girl friend, then one day she broke up with me and I was all heartbroke. It was like my world had ended. She had told me she was babysitting down the street from her house that night, and couldn't be reached, but being all heartbroke and forlorn, I wanted to talk to her real bad. So I spent a couple hours going through the Hurst phone book and calling every house on her street, asking whoever answered the phone if my girl was babysitting there, and sometimes my pathetic little story would come out, and the old man that had answered the phone would advise me:
“Damn, son, just go out a git you another girl, Hurst is full of pretty girls to call.”
It didn’t do any good, and I just kept calling every house on Oak street. I guess I must have missed one, because by the time I got to “Zystroski”, I had not found her.

So I decided the next best thing to do would be to just walk on over to her house, and sit in her front yard and wait for her to come home, where she would see my miserable ass, in the rain, sitting and waiting for her, and she would know then how much I loved her, and she would realize how unkind it was for her to put me through this horrible grief, and since she could not be so unkind as all that, she might take me back, and comfort and solace me in my time of melancholy, there, muddy sad and freezing in her front yard.
And maybe she would do that thing she would do, blowing in my ear and biting my neck because that really drove me wild.
I got to the Hurstview bridge. It was somewhere around midnight in the freezing rain, and as I reviewed my sorry life to this point I determined the best thing to do would be to just end it all, and just throw my heartbroke ass off the Hurstview bridge. It would be the ultimate demonstration of my undying love, equal to that like Dustin Hoffman had made in "The Graduate", pounding the glass in the Chapel, and running off with the stolen bride on a bus.

But something stopped me. I did not do a Billie Joe McAllister off  the Hurstview bridge, but instead walked through the drizzle the 4 blocks back home, and the next day I started taking the old man’s advice about calling all the pretty girls in Hurst.

So every day after 35 years I still pass the Hurstview bridge, and there are two questions that remain.
The first is this:
Am I the only one that ever thought of throwing myself off the Hurstview bridge?
And two:
Does anybody here really think she was babysitting down the street that night?
That’s really what I want to know.

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