Listening to a bridge at dusk

I sat on the approach span for twenty minutes after the last car passed. The steel groaned as it cooled, each contraction like a long exhale—like the bridge was finally allowed to speak after a day of holding traffic. I keep thinking about how we paint over these sounds, call them 'thermal movement,' but they're more like confessions. Some days I think I'm not inspecting them so much as receiving their testimony.