happy daylight savings time, happy international women's day, happy women's history month, happy birthday to one of my oldest and most brilliant friends, happy first weekend of east coast spring.

these days i am trying to stop reinventing my life in entirety every two-and-a-half-years, but still, i am tempted by the renewal promised by every first day of east coast spring. everything is newly possible: pleated skirts, cold brew, sunsets on the water, denim jackets, basil plants on the windowsill, the perfect seasonal salad, long summer bike rides along the east river, becoming someone who loves more fiercely; someone who loves better. i missed california in january, but i didn't miss it for too long — spring here comes in quickly and fearlessly, and californians will never know what it feels like each year when east coast spring declares her arrival. nothing compares to the joy of cycling across a new york city bridge for the very first time after snowmelt, propelled solely by the feeling that in this moment you, too, could be completely made new.

i learned to ride a bike for the first time in amsterdam the summer i was twenty-four, alongside twelve perfect strangers all learning to exist in the world for the first time. we were united only by the question, how does one build a city? we walked amsterdam, copenhagen, boston, vancouver, new york. there, in the first car of the A train, i could see myself existing in the world outside of the 200-kilometer radius of my hometown for the first time. S asked me that day, do you think you could see yourself living here? i told him that i could — and now i do.

what i learned that summer is something i relearn every year: a city is fundamentally defined by its waterways, and as a secondary effect, its bridges — new york is a city on the water and i don't think you can really understand this place until you've traversed its bridges and its waterways. every time i learn a new way to cross over from queens to brooklyn the map becomes more clear to me. some work-in-progress notes on new york city bridges —

brooklyn bridge
the perfect bridge for when you're visiting, no matter if it's the first time or the fifteenth. spend a summer night walking from dumbo in brooklyn to the jane hotel in the west village, marvelling at a sunset over the east river with wonder, in the way that has been done a million times before by everyone who has ever visited this place. you will never make it into the rooftop at the jane because you will spend the night turning perfect strangers into friends instead. walking the brooklyn bridge on a summer night could fix you.

pulaski bridge
this bridge takes you from yuppie backyards made up of questionably ethical high rise apartments to weird brooklyn artist yuppie backyards. if you cycle from astoria into long island city and then cross the pulaski bridge and stop in greenpoint on a weekend summer morning you could spend a few hours with a latte on the patio at cafe alula and watch the seaplanes pass by at wnyc transmitter park and convince yourself that maybe, you could in fact make new york city a real home instead of a temporary one.

queensboro bridge
find yourself on the queensboro bridge at midnight because you made the rookie mistake of trying to take the cross-borough bus from somewhere in no man's land (the upper east side) back into astoria. almost give up on this idea halfway through because it is damn well near impossible to find your way on or off the queensboro bridge in the dark and there are so many cars and it is still thirty degrees at midnight because this is new york city in july, what did you expect? after twenty minutes spent circling the dead-end-definitely-not-the-bridge entrance at "honey" "locust" """park""" looking for the bike lane entrance to this godforsaken bridge you think that maybe you should just give up and spend the night sleeping in a trash can on the street on lexington and 63rd because you'll never make it back to astoria now. this is how you learn to never rely on a bus to take you anywhere here. the bridge is really beautiful against the skyline at night, though, and when you do finally make it home—on the bike!—at 1:30 a.m. in the morning, you are a whole new person — because if you can get yourself home via the queensboro bridge at midnight then you can get yourself home from anywhere in this city at any time of the day and you can only really start calling somewhere home when you have a map of the bike lanes of the place imprinted on your heart.

greenpoint avenue bridge
if you stop on the greenpoint avenue bridge at exactly the right time of the day you can encounter the most quiet spot in all of new york city, and you will realize that you have maybe never really encountered stillness in this place before. the reason for this is that this bridge runs over newtown creek, which is literally vaguely radioactive — this waterway is designated as a superfund site due to decades of industrial pollution. one day in the far future, this place will be beautiful — but for now, for about the timespan of thirty seconds and no more, the greenpoint avenue bridge is a portal into a different dimension.

williamsburg bridge
on a sweltering night in late august, a marathon takes place on this bridge, starting at eight p.m. sharp. the distance of the williamsburg bridge marathon is unveiled 45 minutes into the race, decided by random number generator. it is made up entirely of laps back and forth across the williamsburg bridge. last year the distance was 31.25 miles. completely unrelatedly, once upon a time i had a friend who decided to ran a marathon the next day on a whim to impress a girl. even more unrelatedly, he ended up marrying the girl. i'm not saying that if you run the williamsburg bridge marathon then you will impress the love of your life or that you will get married or even that any girl will be impressed. but perhaps you should consider running the williamsburg bridge marathon.

manhattan bridge
the manhattan bridge is particularly unpleasant to bike across because the Q, N, D and B trains run across it on the same plane as the bike lane, which means that you are almost guaranteed to encounter at least two trains rumbling across the bridge during your commute, and halfway through the ride you are almost certainly guaranteed to regret your decision to even begin cycling across this stupid bridge in the first place because you haven't run a single mile since winter started and are barely hanging on by a thread cardiovascular-health-wise after a winter of only hot yoga and climbing and sometimes hot yoga at the climbing gym. there's a chalk sign on the bicycle lane of the manhattan bridge at the midway point telling you that you are now at the halfway point and it is all downhill from here and indeed, it is all downhill from here. but the manhattan bridge runs from one excellent spot which feels like home (chinatown) to your actual real home (brooklyn) so you will develop a quaint sort of stockholm syndrome for this bridge because how bad can it ever truly be to be cycling home across the manhattan bridge in the most walkable city in the world on the first weekend of east coast spring, really?

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