The Bike To Nowhere

You bought a bike. And at the risk of sounding way less cool after this next revelation, it’s an e-bike. Real bike riders hate e-bikes. You get it. They’re obnoxious. They’re not always visually appealing. They’ve taken over city streets. (Also, the same way one could describe rats). Delivery people use them to zoom down streets, making everyone’s lives a little easier. You got one of those because you thought that’s what it would do for you. You envisioned a world where you would take it with you everywhere. To stores, grocery shopping, and even to other boroughs. But it hasn’t turned out quite how you expected. Fear has guided you most of the way. You’re afraid it’ll get stolen. You’re afraid of people looking at you as you ride. You’re afraid, you’ll get hurt. Afraid, afraid, afraid.

When you got it, it was a bit bigger –taller– than you would have liked, and you seriously considered returning it…until you discovered the company’s return policy meant you would spend hundreds of dollars of your own non-reimbursable money to send it back. So, you decided to stick it through, got a lower seat and did research about bike heights. Your feet aren’t really supposed to fall flat to the ground, you learned. Which is something you wish you had known prior to the purchase. Aside from the bike height, the shady return policy from the even shadier company that you got the bike from, and your immediate buyer’s remorse for a purchase that you really couldn’t afford, there were other things about the bike you hadn’t considered. One being your weight.

You definitely considered your own weight when you purchased the bike. In fact, you got it because it was one of the few that could hold you. You’ve always been a fairly athletic person for someone your size. But you hadn’t considered that getting on and off and carrying your own weight would be hard. Which it has been but you’ve managed somehow. You can get on and off without making a fool of yourself. You even take your dog for rides. And that makes you feel good.

But sometimes you get double takes or long stares or smiles; you know people see you as someone who shouldn’t be able to ride a bike. You feel embarrassed when that happens and other times you don’t care. More than that, the biggest problem with your bike isn’t that it’s too heavy or that you are, or that you don’t have the right accessories, or that you’ve gone through more baskets than you’d like to admit trying to accommodate your dog. The biggest problem is that you have nowhere to go.

The winds of change have swirled around you for several years. In its aftermath, it’s just you and your dog that remain. She’s all you’ve got. You’re all she’s got. It’d be poetic if it weren’t so lonely.

Post pandemic, pre-pandemic, mid-pandemic, it’s always been the same: you don’t have any family left to speak of. They’re not all gone. Except the most important one. But then there’s the father you never knew, the brother who never let you in, the aunts/uncles/cousins who have maintained a comfortable distance, the grandparents who: live far away, are long since dead and one who is in the throes of dementia. And you’ve long since made peace with all of that because you had friends. But you don’t really anymore. They’re there but there’s the one in a toxic relationship, the other one who married a man she barely knew, and the other who’s living a life she never envisioned: each of them has kids now. When there’s kids and families, there’s barely any room for people like you. Which is ok. It’s fine. No, really, you understand that people change and grow and live the lives they’re meant to. But it just makes you a little sad, that’s all.

As people get older, friendships fade away and are replaced by the more important and lasting relationships that define the course of a life: children, partners, nuclear families. You haven’t really had that. So it all just feels like another thing you’re losing.

You don’t think you’ve ever felt loved. Not truly. You know your mom loved you but she was too busy trying to survive so many things that you don’t know that you got what you needed emotionally. You know your friends love you though they all have weird, cold, sometimes very distant ways of showing it. And then, you’ve spent your life chasing after people who could never and did never love you back romantically. Or when they did, it was in all the wrong ways. So, there’s nowhere you feel you belong anymore. You’ve never really felt you belonged anyway. But you especially don’t belong anywhere now. Except at home. Alone. With your dog.

What this all means is that you have nowhere to go. Certainly not with your bike. It’s sort of silly but you feel sad when you look at it sometimes. It just feels like another thing that you were excited about that life showed you shouldn’t have been.

So you’re left with this thing. Charged up. Ready to roll. Sitting still.

The bike. You.