Jessica Cherry reached out to invite me to get coffee a few months back. She was reading my book and had an idea for an essay that needed to get out but did not have any other home. I am so glad she decided to share it through Seattle Bike Blog.
This February it was dark and sprinkling rain and I was walking up a steep hill in Wallingford from the Burke-Gilman Trail pushing the silver Gary Fisher mountain bike that my sister-in-law bought in 1994. In fact, she and I bought the same bike, the same week, back when she was my brother’s girlfriend, now 30 years ago. I remember that she bought the silver one that I wanted from a shop in our hometown that everyone called CycleJerks, and I was stuck with the purple one. She remembers that she bought the bike from our friend who worked at an entirely different store and, doubting my own memory, I’ll assume she’s right. My bike moved to New York City with me and lived there for 10 years with a stable of other bikes until I sold it and moved to Alaska, 18 years ago. My sister-in-law’s followed her back and forth across the country, until it landed in her garage in Seattle.
I was walking the bike up the steep hill because, only a couple of weeks prior, I was still living in Alaska, in the cold slumber of mid-winter, where on any given day my leg muscles might see only hot yoga or a lazy ski, if anything. My embrace of home weight lifting and a bit of snow biking in the pandemic years has tapered, to say the least. Like many of us, my husband and I had been floating, drifting, passing along in the post-pandemic, post-insurrection era, waiting for the next shoe to drop, and then just after Christmas, on a routine health test, it did.
Wait what? Really? We survived the Pandemic years so we could face this? We cursed, wept, and packed for the Good Hospital, in Seattle. Then, Boeing 737s started falling apart and cold temperatures in Kansas canceled our dog’s flight. I pleaded with the customer service “he’s an Alaska husky…and we aren’t going to Kansas…” “I’m sorry ma’am, the whole pet concierge service is shutting down.” I thought about what else I might apply the term “concierge” to and how absurd this all seemed. But, the afternoon before the treatment would start, we made it here, our family of three, collapsing into a friend’s backyard cottage. A few hours later, at the Good Hospital, I watched the first bag of poison flow directly into my husband’s heart.
In the days since that all started, I had found a temporary office out at Sand Point, and now I was biking back to the cottage after the sun had already set. Despite the sprinkling rain, a warm wind brushed my face, just as I dismounted for the steep hill to Wallingford. It had been so long since I’d felt a warm wind at night that I was immediately transported back to the 1990s, and the bike and its creaking gears sent chills down my back. This was a dream, a nightmare, a surreal mindset. I am on my high school bike again, but it isn’t mine. I am living in the same city as my brother again, but it isn’t our home town. He is still the same, but thirty years older, a scientist and a dad. His girlfriend is the same, but now a medical doctor and mother of their children. Our ailing parents now live just a few doors down from them. In 1994, I could not get far enough, fast enough, from my parents and now, here we all were in Seattle.
Did my husband really exist, or had I dreamed him into being, these past eighteen years? Were our home and dogs and Alaskan adventures all erased by some accidental time travel? Was I really still 17 years old, biking home from the coffee shop where I worked after school, my bank account empty but for a thousand tomorrows? I felt dizzy and alarmed. And then, in the intersection, a young man rode past me on a skateboard with a plaid shirt, torn jeans, and a stocking hat over long, blond hair. Maybe it was still 1994 and I was just a daughter. Now I wanted to scream.
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