London Bridge is Burning Down

Don't I wish a London post could just be about London; the River Thames, the Tower Bridge, the view of Big Ben and all that lovely stuff.

Right now, me talking about London would be the equivalent of when my grandparents put on kimonos and gave a three hour lecture/slide projection about their trip to Asia when I was 10.

"...And this is me on the bridge. It was neat-o. Here we are crossing another cool bridge. London has really cool bridges."

You see, I'm just dripping with eloquence about London. Maybe the words will come later, the desire to describe it. Actually, you know what? There is someone who can describe and photograph it much better than I can.

I've got nothing on London because the trip wasn't really about the city itself, it was about reuniting with old friends and contemplating scorching the fuck out of bridges.

Sometimes reuniting with friends brings about the discovery that you don't have as much in common as you had remembered; you are older now and less tolerant of truckloads of bullshit and less willing to spend precious moments in life that are way-too-damn-quickly passing you by alongside people with whom you find no shred of commonality with any longer.

Or maybe the bad news is that you do find commonality but you just really, really don’t want to...you've been trying to flee from those parts of your personality. Your currently fighting yourself to not be that.

Maybe the bridge-burning fantasies are just something that happens in your thirties when you stop caring how you are perceived and start realizing that if you want to live your life the way you truly believe you should, it sometimes means throwing a match to the bridges you can no longer be bothered to cross, mainly because, well, you've been up and down this riverside a shitload of times now and you know damn well there are a million other more beautiful bridges just begging you to cross them.

There are bridges that are more historical in your life, ones that you believe are sturdier, with much more interesting architectural designs that please your eyes and your feet and your spirit as you cross them, solid ones that can take on various onslaughts of meteorological and erosive phenomena, ones that make you feel more secure in that they can seemingly take on much more weight; the weight that true friendship sometimes demands.

I love those bridges; the really good ones.

And it is bridges like these that make the flimsy, shaky ones that are made of old rotted wood, barely held together by a few rusty nails just not seem worth the trouble anymore.

I didn't exactly burn any bridges in London, because maybe I avoid conflict when I should stand up for my values, but on numerous occasions I greedily caressed my matchbook with my index finger, running it up and down the side taking a single powerful match out and teasing it against the sandpaper threateningly, all the while eyeballing some kerosene and begging my husband to shackle me down so I would hinder my pyromaniacal tendencies of ending friendships. Those walking, talking, flammable bridges I sometimes refer to as "my friends", beckoned to be served a molotov cocktail of shut-the-fuck-up with my burning flame of bridge-detonating disapproval.

But in the end, the flimsy-ass bridges remain intact.

I just don't know that I'm gonna cross them anymore.

And that, my friends, was my weekend in London.

And I guess this post officially makes me an asshole.

StumbleIt