There is a bridge in Paris that is covered in locks. There is one in Moscow, too, that I know of, and I suppose one in New York. I seem to remember finding one in London one evening when I was very drunk and laughing and with friends but I can’t recall whether I made that one up. So potentially the Seine, Moskva, the Thames, and the Hudson all have a lock-bridge.
All I suppose I know is that there is one in Paris and one in Moscow.
Young lovers write their names on a lock, usually in nail varnish or permanent marker, and one evening, perhaps at dusk, they will lock it to the bridge. They will probably make some declaration of love while it is being sealed. Perhaps there is something specific you’re supposed to say. I don’t know. I have only observed the result. Nor do I know how or why this started, or who spreads this idea of love-locks and knows the names of the bridges you are supposed to use.
Once a year, the governments of each country with a lock-bridge employ a civil worker to come and cut the locks off. I wonder whether the workers know of locks’ meaning and whether it’s a task they consider portentious or simply onerous, or whether they even bother to think anything of it at all. I imagine the sound the bolt-cutters make as they snap each lock off, each a different sound given width and thickness and durability of specific locks. I wonder if there are some so sturdy - so large and industrial - that the worker simply gives up on them. He’s only a civil worker, he’ll tell himself. One or two can stay.
Perhaps that’s all that’s stopping the lock-bridges from disappearing - one or two locks which are rediscovered and examined by the next year’s young lovers, their meaning immediately gleaned, before being copied. And so on.
I wonder if you waited on the bridge until late at night - late, late after the bars have closed and the evening is calm and quiet - whether you’ll find some poor drunk soul fumbling with an old box of keys, hoping to unlock their old lock so they can throw it into the river’s deeps, the relationship outlasted by a damned chunk of metal.
I don’t think that happens. That sounds like something out of a movie. Perhaps the locks are simply forgotten.
Paris in Spring, and the trees stream down blossoms while couples cut, cut, cut their names into the old wood below.
