Over a week went by and I didn’t think about riding the bike. I climbed into my truck each day, glad to be drinking a cup of tea, glad to listen to the radio while I drive. I drove into work each day unconcerned about the weather, indifferent to potholes and puddles. I had a simple trek to Flint for Thanksgiving dinner with aunts and cousins then headed back home around 7:30PM, in a slow drizzle with temperatures under 50 degrees. I am glad to have the truck now. Glad I don’t have to “suit up” before a visit with family. Glad I can dress in heels and a skirt fresh from the shower rather than as a change of clothes I bring in my saddlebags. And still, I managed to get in a ride on the bike after all.
I drove to Kalamazoo on Saturday afternoon to pick up my bike from Lifecycle. It turned out Pat was right, she needed only a new gasket. I had the valves checked and four needed adjusting. I got the block off kit and the carbs adjusted, too. All for a very reasonable price. And they took good care of her- had her all clean and shiny as the first day I drove her off the lot. This weekend, riding her off the parking lot, it felt like days rather than a few weeks since I’d been on her. She is so familiar to me. My hands reach easily for the controls, muscle memory guiding my movements: easing on the throttle, threading the rear brake at a stop sign, guiding her lean into and through the next curve. Even in fifty degree weather, without a plan to get home, with a dead battery in the GPS and no map to get where I’m going, I still love the ride. I wouldn’t have had this ride, on this day if she hadn’t needed a repair. I wouldn’t have jumped on her to feel this freedom, this easeful pattern of movement in my body. It is cold and my hands are numb, my thighs tight against the tank, shoulders hunched over to preserve warmth. I’m glad to be riding.
Sometimes, like this time, I get to ride when I most need it and when it’s least expected and I tell myself this is the universe taking care of me. I don’t much like using the word God, with all it’s connotations, all the ideas that surround it- like sin, and heaven and hell and adam and eve and the apple. I refrain from using the word God because of all the word can’t say with all these other ideas floating around it and so I say instead the ‘universe.’ Sometimes it feels like there is a caretaking presence that gives me a moment on the bike when I most need it, most need the freedom.
Phil and I had a nice long talk yesterday afternoon- well, he talked and I listened. I tried to hear in all his talking what I most needed to hear. What a benevolent force might want me to hear if there was a reason I was on Phil’s couch to hear what he most needed to say, after his day unfolded as it did, after my own Black Friday. I don’t believe in God the way I was taught to as a child, can’t believe in that way of thinking about things that happen. Sometimes some things happen in just such a way, at just such a time that I’m left staring into a well of feelings that spring up out of some hidden place. This is what happened on Friday.
I ran into my past. It came at me from right around the corner, right around the bend. I was shoe shopping at a favorite store and from around the aisle came a person straight out of my past, straight out of a memory so fresh and stark and harsh, I turned my head and hid my eyes from the intensity of it. We made small talk, very small – about shoes and the holiday – and finally I acknowledged the past sitting there between us and he did, too.
I’m standing there, our past between us, this other life we’d had together and all I can feel is how much I want to run away, run out of the store, out of the memory, out of the feelings that come when I think of that time in my life. But I don’t run. I turn around in that moment, turn around to face what is being shown to me, what perhaps, some benevolent force is showing me. I see the life this man still wants. I see the way his desires ruled him, reigned over our life together and I see how it nearly destroyed me - listening to and giving into those desires. I bit back my own fears and I let his desires lead us, then consume me, devour me.
During that relationship, I met Patrick, a full-hearted man I’d met through yoga practice. He sat with me for hours each week, drinking cup after cup of tea as I sorted through the life I’d built with this other man. He was, for me, during those long nights sitting across from one another, the divine embodied. Patrick taught me to listen to what I was thinking, what I was feeling, what I wanted and needed. He taught me through his deep presence and awareness, that I am worth listening to.
It took a lot of practice, a lot of riding, of writing, to find my own way, to let go of another’s desires and find my own. When I did, I no longer wanted that relationship, that life we had and so I walked out of it. But around that corner, in the aisle of that store, it all came flooding back – the woman I was, the life I’d left, the plans we’d made and then abandoned. I saw in that moment in the store, that I had done the right thing by leaving when I did. I saw that the life I’ve made for myself since, the life that has built itself up around me, is the life built by my desires, my needs. My life is full of writing and riding and friendships and laughter, of full-bodied hugs and tender kisses and motorcycle vacations. And it’s filled with scary thoughts and feelings and disappointments and sadness but also with enough people willing to listen, hold my hand and walk with me through it.
Phil told me the other day that I don’t go to church because I haven’t got God. He doesn’t really know because he’s only talked with me of his God, his religion. And he’s right in some ways, my god isn’t in the Bible, isn’t in a church, isn’t in following the rhetoric of Jesus’ teachings. My god is in the moments on my bike and listening to friends talk long into the night and holding another in my arms, feeling the fullness of her whole being. My god is the force that guides me into the lives of people who need something I have and share readily. My god is the needs that are answered by friends when my own resources are spent. My god is in knowing that no idea of god can possibly encompass the mystery of this life, the energies guiding it or the forces of nature that stir it all up and tear it all down.
When that man came around that corner and showed me the life I’d left, it was like a wind came swirling up around us and captured us in its center, holding us in its vortex of stillness. Its turbulence lifted even the weightiest of memories and scattered the dust of that life so when we parted, it was final. He to his life, and me to mine. The Bonneville sits in Phil’s garage until I find a ride down, until it’s time to listen again, until I need a reason for another ride on her. She sits and waits until the forces of god and nature and desire come swirling about and make it so.
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