June 22nd, 2017, Thursday. Journal: Learning to ride

I wake up at 6, takes twenty minutes to persuade myself from bed.  It’s still crushingly busy at work: I fell asleep on the warehouse floor at midnight earlier this week, while the boys kept humming on, til 1 am, 1:30, 2… 

So sleepy.  But this has been my plan: this is the morning I’ll ride my motorcycle in the street.  

So far I’ve just been noodling around, practicing in parking lots.  Scooting my Rebel along the greasy, cracked strip of asphalt back and forth behind our warehouse.  
Almost running into ditches, parked cars, etc.

However.

Goddammit I’m doing this.  Because this is the day and this is my plan.

Unlocking the wheel, strapping my tank bag on.  Wiping the seat off with a painter’s rag; embarrassedly waiting for the man sleeping in his van across the street to drive away before I hop on and duck-walk down our gravel driveway into the street.
FINE-C, sitting there warming up, watching the traffic.  Lots more of it than I planned.

Clutch out... 

I’m suddenly so nervous I feel like I have to pee, maybe throw up, but when I don’t kill it on my first turn off the street suddenly I no longer give a shit about the cars, the people watchful inside them.
“You have a right to do this,” I keep saying- or hearing- in my head, and how funny that this is what it says to me, this voice I’ve never heard before- “You have a right to learn this.”
Killing the bike on turns; motoring happily around Hampton Park, taking up space at stoplights-
“You have a right to do this!”

I go chilling through a series of neighborhoods, azalea blooms fallen electric in the street, smashing through sleepy mirrors full of nothing, house after house with its eyes closed beneath the draping branches of wandering oaks,
and then manage to kill it somehow right in the middle of the (thank god empty) road.  Swedish-looking middle-aged woman walking by with her tiny dog.  Fussing my bike into movement again, I grin over at them: “I’m gonna do this!”
She flexes her muscle at me, smiling a little- “You’re gonna do this!”
And then I do, I ride away, very slowly, haha, down the block.

I don’t hit any cars and no cars hit me.  

My Rebel 250 is just a gloriously sexy scooter, really; and I don’t look cool on it, not with my cat glasses, my big silver spaceman helmet, dorky braid hanging down under the back.  Killing it dead and motoring around slow as a tired cow-  
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but I feel the tickling edge of something that must be freedom.

Ah, this muggy, lovely morning, and the air full of water.  Sitting with coffee on the porch watching the sky turn blue, and my bike in the driveway grinning back at me.  
Oh hey there, Thursday.

PS. still saving up for a camera.  Almost there.