Found my old inspection notebook, and it reads like a diary I never meant to write

I dug out a spiral from a 2008 job — just annotations on a rusted bearing, but the margins are full of half-sentences about weather and the guy I used to work with before he retired. There's a poetry in measured crack widths I never noticed until now, like the bridge was talking to me and I was too busy checking the notes to listen. Maybe that's what thirty years of this does: you turn from an engineer into a witness, and the structures just sit there, confessing quietly.