Second Place | musings of a pittsburgher

pittsburgh is a city of things underappreciated. my first trip downtown is spent wading through rare white pigeons & commonplace lanternflies. the former is tiptoed around like an exotic breed of lion while the latter is shouted at & stepped on before it even gets a chance to explore this town.

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the pittsburgh regional transit bus lines are upheld by excitable elderly looking for a story & morose students who just want to get home. i just want to get home but there’s an old lady on board screaming bloody murder at an everyday insect. scratch that — another old lady just gave a single mother change for a $5 bill to pay the fare.

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september in pittsburgh is cigarette butts against my fuzzy hello kitty lunch bag, sweating buckets in the epicenter of the city, just for a bus that’ll never come. here it comes — everyone peels themselves off the brick walls of a (closed) bbq chicken place (which they stood beneath in a vain attempt to reach a sliver of shade), relieved, muttering under their breaths, “finally,” unaware they were all waiting for the same thing.

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you’ve never experienced true peace until you’ve made it onto a bus that’s headed in the right direction, independent of your mother’s gas money. the phrase “walking on sunshine” pales in the face of the little dance i do as soon as i hop off the bus & walk up the trail i’ve been trekking since i was a little girl, towards a house i’ve been living in for what seems like even longer.

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pittsburgh is the best & worst place to build a school. imagine wading through blocks & blocks of construction, gasoline worming its way into your lungs & jackhammers ringing in your ears as you sit down for your intro to film class. wait — i don’t have to imagine that.

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who thought that a two-hundred-foot-wide fountain smack dab in the middle of three rivers was a smart idea? i couldn’t even get close enough to the point state park fountain to snap a decent photo, for fear of getting drenched by prickly droplets of cold water catapulted by high-speed winds, log-jammer-style. though i guess getting wet’s par for the course, since every other parkgoer looked at me like i was insane once i left the fountain behind after not even five minutes of ogling, my mother screaming in my ear “how am i, a car, supposed to get to you, a fountain?”

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how has studying in a literal cathedral become so normal in the matter of a week? this might not be an exclusively pittsburgh thing, but how does every pitt student walk into cathy with their gaze fixed straight ahead, instead of mirroring my neck-craned jaw-agape position at the grandness of it all? i suppose it’s just grand, is all.

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i’m talking about the lanternflies again. there are only two people who i’ve witnessed treat these so-called invasive insects with the mercy they so desperately need: my best friend & a frat boy in front of me in the line at panther central who picked up the red-&-black-winged critter in the palms of both his hands like some lost kitten, murmuring, “give me you.”

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pittsburgh is easy, not because it only took me a week to learn how the buses work but because its neon signs & disembodied crosswalk voices hold your hand as you traverse the city, silently assuring you that you are headed in the right direction.

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pittsburgh is beautiful, not because it’s filled with particularly beautiful things but because its people don’t bat an eye at some girl with no arms sitting herself down & scratching the back of her ear with her bare feet (hey, you gotta tame that itch somehow). needless to say, my own gremlin habits where i sit on the hot, filthy pavement & chew on salted starbucks potato chips waiting for a bus to nowhere is nothing if not commonplace in this town of pretty contradictions.