Thursday: Writing

So the unexpected took a, well...unexpected turn, and I'm back to the drawing board. Or something like that. To say I am not mildly heartbroken would be a lie...but that's what bicycles are for!

Despite my best efforts, I am hopelessly romantic, and I would rather love and hurt a thousand times than never love at all.

In accordance with my decision to face all obstacles with positivity and determination I will make something good of this.

At least I'm trying!

And hey! I got some writing out of it!

A rusted, mutilated bicycle reared up out of the sand, like some great prehistoric beast thrashing against the grips of a tar pit. I edged carefully around it, remembering a similar scene from one of my earliest trips.

He sat on a beached log near the bicycle, whittling a bar of soap with a knife. The soap flakes flew off into the breeze like snow.

"You don't need to say it, Liz," he said without looking up.

The tears had been in my eyes the entire three mile trek over.

"Why are you crying?" he asked.

"I'm not crying. It's that goddamn soap. It got in my eyes."

"Let your ego go, Liz."

I sniffled. "I can't let it go. It'll drown us both."

"I can swim. Come on, just let it go."

So I did, and I fell to my knees and cried more openly than I had in a while. He put the soap and the knife down and drew me to him. I put my head on his knees and wept. He touched my hair.

"I just miss you. I miss you so much. In everyone all around me I keep catching glimpses of you, but when I look closer, it's only the memory playing off the back of my eye. Why can't it just be like the way it was?"

"I don't know."

"But you do know! Just let me have it! Just fucking let me have it!" I reached for the soap and the knife, but he grabbed it away.

"I don't know anymore than you do because I'm your creation and I can only know as much as you make me know."

"No, you know some other things."

"No Liz, you know those things as well, you just won't admit them."

"I wanna get stoned."

"Well that's sort of perfect because I was just carving you a pipe!" He opened his palm, and indeed he held a crude soap pipe, although it was blue instead of green this time.

"I don't have any weed."

He looked at me incredulously.

I laughed nervously. "Hahah, I forgot." I reached into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled baggie of stale shake, although my pocket had been empty just a minute ago.

"You can make anything in the world and this is what you make?" He laughed.

"Well, it's what I've got left back in the...in the real world, you know? And you were never really one to discriminate, as I recall." I packed a bowl and let him have the greens.

"Ahem.... Lighter?"

I was feeling stronger already, so I just blew lightly on the pipe and it was instantly lit with the most perfect cherry. He was impressed. He took a hit, tapping his thumb over the carb in a fashion I'd never seen anyone else replicate, and he slowly blew the smoke out.

He passed the pipe to me, still cherry. "This is like old times," I said.

"Old times for forever and ever." His eyes turned narrow and bleary.

"My favorite song ever is this song by the Moody Blues called 'In Your Wildest Dreams.'"

He started singing, "Once beneath the stars, the universe was ours. Love was all we knew, and all I knew was you. I wonder if you know, I wonder if you think about it...once upon a time, in your wildest dreams...."

"How did you know that!"

"Come on Liz."

"You know, when I was a kid, my dad would play that song in the car, and I would sing along and think I knew what the words meant."

"But now...."

"But now...I listened to the song the other day, and I thought of you when I thought I would never think of you again, and I was trying to let you go, but part of me just couldn't. When I was a kid, that song was magic, and it's still magic, and I still believe...."

He put a finger over his lips and I hushed with curiosity.

He drew his fist out of his pocket and turned it palm up in front of me. He uncurled his fingers and lying inside was a single daisy petal.

I gasped.


I came to the beach one day to discover it occupied by someone else.

"Oh no, not you!" I said.

"What?" he said.

"You gotta go, dude, you gotta get out of here." I began pushing on him, but he was made of stone, and wouldn't budge. I put my shoulder up against his side and leaned into it, and he began sliding forward.

"Does this mean I get to be in your book?"

"Yeah, but you don't get to be in my mind."

"Don't you think that's a little rash?"

"I just can't have you here, not like this." I paused from my work, sweating under the glaring overcast sun.

"Yeah, but it's not like I don't care."

"I know I know, I know you care. It's fine. You just can't stay here, you gotta go find your own shore."

"Well...all right."

I resumed shoving, making slow progress toward the water. At one point I slipped, scraping my elbows and bruising my knee. The sting brought tears to my eyes. "Look! Now you made me cry!"

"That's not hard to do."

"Whatever." I sniffled. Maybe he was right. I wiped my nose clean. I put my hands on my hips. I scratched my head. "Well all right now, time to finish this." I pulled up my sleeves and gave a final heave.

He slid soundly into the water, and then a giant wave rose out of the sea, devouring him.

"That was nice I suppose."

I threw one long-stemmed lily out, and it drifted into the horizon.


I came another day to the beach and found someone else there.

I started when I recognized the face, the shape, the size.

I kicked at him.

But he was just a cardboard cutout who tipped over and was carried away by the wind.

Writing April 30 2009

One day we went to a bike path and my friend said to me, "Okay, we're going to draft now."

I knew what drafting was, but I had never done it beyond following closely behind my dad's bike as a kid.

The girl in front of me right now was very fast and very serious.

"Okay, you want to try to stay like, six or so inches behind my wheel, all right? And just concentrate on the wheel, just look at the wheel, and you have to trust me. If there's anything ahead, I'll call it out. Got it?"

"Yeah," I said in a small voice.

"Okay, here we go." She pulled up in front of me and I aimed my bike. "You're gonna know when you've got it, you're gonna feel it." I closed in and she broke a steady, swift clip.

Nervously suspicious, I glanced up, and lost my spacing, I looked back down. I tried to concentrate on the wheel and not at the world speeding dizzily by on my immediate peripherals. My wheel wavered, I brought it center. I focused on her wheel, on that perfect wheel, spinning and spinning for eternity.

And it suddenly became still, and everything else fell away. It was only me and the wheel, comets chasing each other down the Milky Way. Just me and that perfect black skinny wheel, the wheel became my world, it became my everything.

The bicycle between my legs suddenly seeped into my skin, and we were one, entwined, humming along like a perfect machine. We raced after the wheel, all other things had ceased to exist...sky, earth, water, plants, rocks, aluminum, steel, flesh, bone, blood, pain.

"I'm going to go faster," she said, but I didn't hear her.

We kicked up, grabbing after the wheel, obsessed with the wheel, in love with the wheel. The wheel spun and spun and spun, and yet it seemed to go nowhere, even as we flew. How I would have given myself just to be one with that wheel for the rest of my days - I would never even notice their passing.

"Liz!" my friend yelled.

I looked up. It broke, it shattered like a mirage made of water let loose from its spell.

"You gotta be careful," she said, "You can get hypnotized."

When we stopped it was as if the world came to a grinding halt.

I had to stop to smoke a cigarette.

Writing April 30 2009