Thursday: Writing

Today I am plagued by a strange ache.

And so I write. Now I ride.

When he first saw her she was working in the community bike shop at a truing stand. She spun the wheel and eyed it for hops, conservatively applying the wrench to different spokes for an even adjustment, then spinning the wheel again and watching the rim against the indicators. He watched her through a blur of motion, her face drawn to one spot as if meditating.

I was twenty-five years old and I was lost. The world had crashed onto me like a wave, and then the water had receded, leaving me drowned in the sand. I rode my bicycle as far and as fast as I could, but reality always caught up with me at the red lights or in bed at night. You had changed my world, and without you, my world was nothing. They say that you need to learn to be independently happy, but they also say that companionship breeds happiness. All I know is that I miss you.

When I first saw you, I was struck by your confidence, uninhibited as it was in those moments of concentration. There was no world. There was only the spinning rim and Radiohead's "Creep" came on the radio, and it was one of those sensational fantastic moments.

They rode along the beach at dusk, their bellies warm with dark beer. The boardwalk was empty and their tail lights blinked like red fireflies. A cigarette stuck out the side of her mouth and his head was pleasantly hazy. She looked back at him and her hair caught in the wind. She smiled wanly at him and said, "I've never been here after dark. It's so nice with all the people gone."

It was a brisk ride home, so he was grateful to collapse into her bed, into the amber glow of her small apartment. She later wrapped her legs around him and he made the closest thing to love that he could understand. Her skin smelled like the ocean and her hair smelled like the dry California heat.

I had never understand what it was like to be so deeply connected to a person like that. It was like everything folded into us and I no longer felt alone. We were fused with light and your body felt bottomless. A pit of pleasure grew inside of me and I dug deeper. It hurt to break outside of myself, it burned me to touch you like that, but the burn was pure and cleansing, and even though I shattered against you, I came back together a new person.

She painted her face to attend the group ride. There was, after all, an element of childlike rebellion to riding en masse through the deserted streets of the city, flaunting its rules and its restrictions, and believing in magic though the grown ups would have you don a suit. They howled through tunnels, reveled in the mob adrenaline, and rested gently in a net of camaraderie, and nothing felt more right than that harmless lawlessness.

He would lose her in the crowd and he would worry even though he told himself that everything would be okay. There was still some danger, there were kids who didn't watch where they were going, there were potholes, there were aggressive drivers, and there were cops with an agenda. The world was as potentially ugly as it was beautiful - and he often found the world vastly beautiful.

He found her at the stops, where she would be talking with someone new, smiling and laughing and touching her own hair. When she spotted him, her eyes were full of deep sensual mirth. She would throw back a beer and smoke the pot offered to her, and her eyes would sink deeper in her head. And maybe it was with a bit of jealousy that he would wonder if she had been worried about him as they reclaimed the streets in their ragtag pack.

Was it my insecurity or your insecurity that held me back? Was it the way you didn't seem to care? Or was in the way you were to scared to give someone a compliment? You were desperately wild, clinging to the last threads of a dream gone stale, yet you drank deeply from life, so deeply, in fact, that you nearly drank me dry. You did drink me dry. Your surface rippled with the pain of a very small girl in a very big world. When you knew someone was watching, you changed.

You occasionally gave too much and you occasionally took too much, but I am as much to blame as you are, because sometimes I wouldn't take when you gave and sometimes I wouldn't give when you took. I was very young back then, much younger than I am now. Sadness ages you, and the emptiness of the space you once occupied weighs heavily on my brow and arches my back into an old man's. For your size you occupied a very great space.

One day she opened a heart-shaped box and inside was a sugar cube wrapped in tinfoil. She put the cube in her mouth and its colors soaked into her saliva. It was acid and it seeped out of her skin through her fingers, and everything she touched turned into watercolors. He ate the acid too and they laid on a blanket in a park, his head in her lap. She stroked his hair as she spoke riddles to herself, winding her tongue around and around itself until the words ceased to have meaning, and then it was only her fingers combing the strands of his hair and separating them into waves of warmth. He had lost all sense of time in that place, in that place dripping in the back of his mind, and when he finally got up at the tug of her hand he wasn't sure which world he had come to.

He looked to her for an answer, but instead fell into her gaping pupils. He fell and he fell and he fell, and he was scared.

It was foolish. We never considered how we were going to get home. We figured only that we'd mount our two-wheeled steeds and they would guide us back. Fortunately we weren't that far from your apartment, so we just walked the bicycles, trusting our feet more than our heads. It was a long walk, and it reminded me of the gift of two wheels.

But it didn't really matter too much, the sky reached up in front of us, dragging the night down to the horizon. In Los Angeles the seasons all blur into one long hot wind. Before I knew it I was drunk and tangled in your sheets, and my heart ached even though I had everything I wanted before me. Maybe it was the drugs.

One time they were just riding home when she was struck and killed by a car. Moments before he had been riding behind her when something caught his eye and caused him to look away from the road. On the opposite sidewalk a ghost had appeared, and its rear wheel was visibly out of true. He thought about the first time he had ever seen her, he thought about the way the individual spokes blurred together and then vanished when she spun the wheel, and he thought about the sound of the indicator scraping against the rim. He thought about the look of concentrated calculation on her face and then he thought about the way she closed her eyes and arched her back in the throes of orgasm. When he was on top of her he would look at her face contorting with pleasure, almost ugly. She would open her eyes with such a look of fierce vulnerability that he would orgasm, his whole body shaking with the release, and beneath him, she moaned and he could feel her body tighten and then relax.

And then he would pull out, and more and more he felt alone and shattered when he did. She would smoke a cigarette naked in bed and ask him what was wrong. And he would say, "Nothing."

When he looked back to the road it was just in time to hear the squeal of brakes, but she was already on the ground. Where there had once been a person there was now only crumpled flesh. It was barely human. When the ambulance wailed in the distance, it was clearly too late.

But that's why I won't talk to you at the truing stand. I can see you glance at me, how flattered I am to be the only thing more interesting than your task.

Forgive me, I am twenty-five years old and I am lost. They say that you need to learn to be independently happy, but they also say that companionship breeds happiness. All I know is that I miss you, and it is the only thing I am certain of in this very confusing world.

I hope our paths shall meet again, but I am leaving soon for a place far away.

In one moment I loved you, but I was too scared to tell you.

Our ships have passed in the dark and I am lost at sea. I may never see land again. My sails are torn and my crew has mutinied.

What else could I have done?

Could I have paid more attention? Could I have called your name? Could I have suggested a different route?

Could you have been only a dream that I whispered in the dark?

Writing June 4 2009