by Katherine Zheng

Photo credits: Paul Bica, Bob Price, and tortoon; digitally altered by Hafsah Jasat

This article contains discussion of suicide. Reader discretion is advised.

I spent a lot of time on the bridge commonly known as the Bloor Viaduct. I passed through it twice a day, 5 days a week for 4 years. It has high-wire bars 5 metres tall, preventing anybody from getting close to the edge. It prevents me from getting close to the edge. It arches high above the trees, so that birds can see its span of 494 metres of concrete and steel, 40 metres above the Don Valley. It would be a nice view going down. I think about the exhilaration that would follow the cold wind in my hair; the uncomfortable feeling that would rise from my stomach to my chest. The thoughts pass. They have passed. They will pass. My feet stay stuck on solid ground. The rumbling feeling of concrete beneath my soles signals the passage of the train. I follow it, albeit much slower. I continue my walk along the bridge, connecting Bloor Street East to Danforth Avenue. The train rushes back into the tunnel, a momentary glimpse of light before plunging into darkness again.

Coming from Scarborough, the transit down to Rosedale Heights School of the Arts was treacherous. Especially for a teenager like me, who struggled to get up in the morning and loved to nap after school. Rosedale was a commuter school, which meant everyone there felt the similar pain of getting up at 6:30 AM with an hour-long train ride before a 9:00 AM class. But for me, getting up was hard. Harder on some days. Having been diagnosed with severe depression, being alive often made me want to squeeze my arms around my legs. As if I could somehow transform into a black hole and suck everything into it, including myself. It was a more poetic—and less depressing—way of phrasing the idea of wanting to die. So, getting up every day to go through the mundane motions of human existence was simply an exhausting task.

With nearly 500 suicides by 2003, the amount associated with the bridge caused the construction of what is now known as the Luminous Veil.

I spent a lot of time on the Bloor Viaduct, both speeding through the lower-half—my face stuck to the dirty glass window of the subway—and on the upper-half, walking across the concrete ground during my lunch break. With only one hour to spare between classes, I was one of many who would speed-walk across the bridge to grab lunch from various fast-food places and then speed-walk back. I was always a slow walker, and was inevitably left jamming food down my throat in the last 5 minutes of break. An uncomfortable lump would be left in my throat by my fries, moist from the condensation, and my mostly unchewed burger.

But it was a nice walk, and that was why I liked to take my time with it. Despite the wide roads populated with obnoxious and impatient cars, the noise was almost like static that drowned out my loud brain. I always tried to get as close to the edge of the bridge as I could, but the steel rods would block my way—my view. I would touch them as I walked along the sidewalk, my hands brushing against the metal as if I was playing the guitar strings for a giant.

There’s one thing that sets the Bloor Viaduct apart from many of the other bridges in Toronto. Over time, the infamous bridge became an attractive location for suicide—gravity pulling like a magnet down to the ground, posing a threat to the traffic underneath it. Starting from its creation in 1918, the bridge accumulated nearly 500 suicides by 2003, which is when construction began on what is now known as the Luminous Veil.

Even from the distance of a zooming car on the Don Valley, it’s hard to miss. Its appearance seemed weirdly brutalist for a structure with such a poetic-sounding name. The Luminous Veil consists of over 9,000 steel rods, 5 inches apart and 16 feet high. I liked to touch the steel. They would get cold during the wintertime, when the relentless wind and snow showed them no mercy. The unexpected jolt into my fingertips would ground me back into my body, leaving the threat of being blown out like a lit candle for another day.

To be on the Bloor Viaduct during sunset is a sight. I would pretend that I was a bird, the man-made construction crumbling away below my feet and leaving me soaring through the sky, at heights no human could naturally reach. The sky would smear with pink and orange, like an artist halfway through their painting, the hues left unmixed and streaky. When the sun dipped its head below the hills, the darkness would set in. And the Luminous Veil would light up—an array of lights illuminating the steel strings. Today, they still gleam and glow in the absence of everything, screaming at you to pay attention to it.

For 24/7 suicide and crisis care in Canada and the US, please call or text 988, or visit: 988.ca (Canada) or 988lifeline.org (US) for more resources.