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it's the rain. honest.
I bike at night. I bike at the times just after the sun has fallen, so that it is fear and not freedom that peeks around the edges of my mind.
I notice the smallest things- it's part of the job description. I see the way orange lamp-light shines on my front wheel's spokes, glowing and flickering. I smile at the way headlights show the shadow of some fantastic seven-legged creature instead of a girl on a bike. I count stars, which is not a difficult task in Metro Manila, but still not the smartest thing for a girl on a bike to do.
I cut across the streets as though I own them. I weave past pedestrians and call "Excuse me" to random cats crossing the street- how are they to know what this two-wheeled contraption does? (Though if they have lived for that long in Metro Manila, they can probably guess.) Once I ran over a cockroach I spotted two seconds too late.
I bike like zombies from hell are chasing me, imagining pounding footsteps and vicious laughter and rain, my heart pouding in the fear of an induced nightmare- why should I not experience what my characters do? Without the falls, of course: I have never yet fallen off a bicycle without really abnormal human intervention. I think I fall often enough on foot to make up for that.
I race against anything that can be raced against. Sometimes I deliberately stay in the way of the car I know is behind me, pedaling as fast as I can towards our front gate, trying my best to ignore the glaring headlights and the impatient thrum of the motor, stubbornly refusing to move to one side while wondering which would last longer, the driver's patience or my ride, knowing somewhere in the mind that is so riddled with fantasy it cannot tell fact from fiction that I needed to escape, that I needed to fly.
Sometimes I almost feel as if I can.
I notice the smallest things- it's part of the job description. I see the way orange lamp-light shines on my front wheel's spokes, glowing and flickering. I smile at the way headlights show the shadow of some fantastic seven-legged creature instead of a girl on a bike. I count stars, which is not a difficult task in Metro Manila, but still not the smartest thing for a girl on a bike to do.
I cut across the streets as though I own them. I weave past pedestrians and call "Excuse me" to random cats crossing the street- how are they to know what this two-wheeled contraption does? (Though if they have lived for that long in Metro Manila, they can probably guess.) Once I ran over a cockroach I spotted two seconds too late.
I bike like zombies from hell are chasing me, imagining pounding footsteps and vicious laughter and rain, my heart pouding in the fear of an induced nightmare- why should I not experience what my characters do? Without the falls, of course: I have never yet fallen off a bicycle without really abnormal human intervention. I think I fall often enough on foot to make up for that.
I race against anything that can be raced against. Sometimes I deliberately stay in the way of the car I know is behind me, pedaling as fast as I can towards our front gate, trying my best to ignore the glaring headlights and the impatient thrum of the motor, stubbornly refusing to move to one side while wondering which would last longer, the driver's patience or my ride, knowing somewhere in the mind that is so riddled with fantasy it cannot tell fact from fiction that I needed to escape, that I needed to fly.
Sometimes I almost feel as if I can.