The motorcycle, in image and symbol, is among the tritest of metaphors for freedom.
The wild open road. Hot sun lapping at tattoo-inked skin. Desert wind flying through silvering strands of overgrown hair. No fucks given. Not a silly little care in the whole damn world.
Adventure in novelty. Unpredictable. Spontaneous. Everything you’re not; everything you desire to become. The stuff of dreams, film scripts, coming of age sagas, mid-life crises.
Cliché as shit.
Yet, alas, in the trending annals of the postmodern psyche: never without its enduring allure.
“To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there’s always a roar and you can’t fall anywhere. You’re already there.”
That’s what you were looking for, right? Freedom from your decaying marriage, fresh adventure in the mud to bury all those dying dreams and build some of your own along that lonely jungle road? Innocent enough, I reckon.
How ‘bout a suntanned surfer girl in cutoff jean shorts and a cute n’ weathered little pink crop top, reeling from her own storybook heartache, desperate to cut ties and run for her life?
Sure, I’ll throw her in, too.
After all, that rusted Honda CB1 was the last thread of connection she held to the man who taught her to drive it, to a home that housed too much of her past to entertain any real future; too much pain on the vine of nostalgia to possibly accommodate any new leaves. Tired metaphors betwixt ageing desires, turns out that shanty frame on two threadbare wheels was her ticket to freedom, too.
Well, have we got ourselves a deal?
Cash exchanged in the air-conditioned lawyer’s office, heat rising between my beat-up heart and your brilliant baby blues, we hid out from the rain. To celebrate the start of separate freedoms, we shared spoons over curry and dessert, risky business in those early pandemic days. Five hours into our motorcycle buying-and-selling date-that-couldn’t-actually-be-a-date, the store closed before you could fill your shopping list. As you drove me home on your new wheels still titled in my name, I wondered if your empty grocery bags would be the nail in the coffin on the dusk of your impending divorce.
I hope to be a fictional character in your story someday, you texted after reading some recent satire I’d sent you, brazen with (im)possibility.
We hugged goodbye on the beach before I headed south for the season, what I had hoped was forever. I complimented your wife’s mala beads, a gift from you, and wondered if she saw us; if it was cold of me not to care.
“There are no living people in my work, only characters, which are figments animated by imagination plus a small number of qualities shared by the person on whom they are based. They are a process and a product of radical reduction.”
I flooded the rental car in a rainstorm on hour eleven of my drive, stuck in a river, 80-pound Rottweiler on my lap just before midnight, ten minutes down the road from my new, albeit temporary, home.
I couldn’t taste my breakfast or smell the white ginger flowers in bloom, the same morning your separation turned real. Over everyday video calls across spotty internet connections, you kept me in high spirits through the anxiety of quarantine; I was easy company to your new life alone.
I tucked a freshly plucked daisy into your shirt pocket just after you kissed me for the first time, my side of the gulf you had boated over to meet me. Backlit by the sea, your eyes never looked so bright, so tired, in their life.
We got cozy over ramen in the gentrifying gastro-district on the east side of the city. Then cozier still at a hole-in-the-wall B&B on a quiet street, fake flowers and ceramic knick-knacks stoic witness to the sweaty anticipation of our simultaneous pleasure.
I followed you back along the dusty jungle road to your new home, arms wrapped around your chest on my old motorcycle, in the place I stilled dreamed of leaving behind.
Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. My own personal Hotel California. I had definitely checked out, but could never seem to leave.
Because who needs freedom when you’ve got fireworks on the beach, a warm heart in borrowed sheets, a fresh shot at new love to diesel-wash the rust off old frames?
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
Nothin’, it ain’t nothin’ honey, if it ain’t free
And feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues
You know feelin’ good was good enough for me”
I proposed an open relationship as you transitioned out of your marriage. You made it clear: if I was into that, you weren’t into me. So, we settled, by default, on monogamy. Flattered, against my better judgment, I figured it’d be fine.
For months it was reggae on Saturday, blues on Sunday. Coco-oats and pizza nights, sunsets with our pups. We were boring, in a good way. I hadn’t known healthy in a committed relationship, perhaps ever. After the high-low rollercoasters I’d been on, boring was a welcome change.
I tried to make your baby at my best friend’s birthday party. We surfed frigid SoCal seas on brand-new boards in too-tight suits. We took a month-long trip to mainland Mexico, left-breaking waves up the coast as far as the eye could see. Fish tacos, vegan mole and bootleg mezcal with lime and salt. Love made and mostly lost in kitsch cabinas, soundtracked by the ocean, cartel kids camped out smoking Semana Santa cigs.
I got curious about your vision for our future. You hadn’t the time to consider it, you said, still sorting through who to be, what the fabric of your own dreams might be made of. As that sunsetting reality set in across the fictions of my 36-year-old horizon, manipulated into monogamy – for what? –, I was angry before I was sad.
I missed going right, the life I’d stitched for myself before trying you on for size. I wallowed, wet with self-pity, in the sandy inferno dream-dilemma of sort-of dating a goofy-footed divorcee.
That character, however fictional he intended to be, however real I thought he’d become, had taken up a lot of space in my story, when all we both had wanted was to be up or down a motorcycle, an excuse to get a little more free.
I left Mexico on my own.
We took time apart. Decided to try something more casual. I rented a friend’s converted container home. You found a cute cabin down the road. We surf-tripped for your birthday before you left to see your family back home. I wasn’t invited. Casual, right?
“Do you want to open things up to meet other people while you’re traveling?” I asked, casually curious. “It’s the first time you’re single. You might wanna see what that feels like.”
“Why would we do that?” you answered. “I’m happy with the way things are.”
Sounds good.
We chatted most days between my writing deadlines and surf sessions, your friends’ weddings, coffee shop meetups, and family affairs. It’s funny how a month on your own can be both quick and slow. In your absence, I found few reasons to stay; began plotting my escape, again. The beach-reading fiction-lover in me, however salty on the page, still hoped you’d care enough to follow.
You joined my family’s weekend vacay. Kids on surfboards, hectic sushi night, a little room for romance to ourselves. You felt different; I chalked it up to all the time away.
He fits right in, Dad confessed, probably tired, mostly, of entertaining boyfriends he’d have to forget.
We said goodbye on the same stretch of shoreline where you had kissed me, nine months earlier, my freeway daisy flimsy in your pocket, fresh in my memory. Silly me thought it was see ya later this time, somewhere on your coast or mine. Everything was fine.
My fictional character had barely boarded the boat back to his side; I was five minutes into my drive:
Why’s your dude on Tinder?
A five-word text vibrated in my lap, flashed across my lock screen, ran through my blood like wind on the back of your motorcycle.
Thanks for the ride.
I think I laughed before I cried.
Sorry, Dad. Another non-boyfriend, for the archives.
“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you the illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
Traveling alone on the last nineteen-kilometer stretch of unmaintained road en route toward my new forever home, I picked up exactly one hitchhiker.
Long-bearded and fictionally versed in hippy pursuits like numerology, he foretold my future as a five. Transformation, he said. He might have watched my eyes roll in the rearview mirror, uncertain his currency was worth its exchange in van rides.
Smiling to myself, I dropped him at his destination, a few minutes from mine.
“What’s your name?” he asked, gentle with Xochi’s tail as he slid the door shut behind him.
“I’m Tara, and you?” Pleasantries are always polite on the bumpy road of life.
“Nice to meet you, Tara. I’m Freedom. Thanks again for giving me a ride.”
I swear this shit writes itself.
Life: stranger than fiction.
The price of freedom, not measured in hitched rides: a nine-hundred-dollar motorcycle looking for a place to die, and about the same in months of my hard-loving wasted time.
In the final wheeling-dealings of motorcycle clichés, freedom and other fictional characters, I think it’s safe to say – in my story, anyway – we all made out okay.
“Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.
Blackbird fly, blackbird fly
Into the light of a dark black night. ”