I Fell off My Bike

I fell off my bike.  I thought I wouldn’t notice. I covered up my grazed heart in the hope no one would see my tears.  I didn’t keep my balance and when I fell it hurt like a hundred tiny broken dreams splinted under my skin.

I fell off my bike and I don’t know what happened.  It felt like I was blindsided by his disappearing act as he walked out backwards without my number in his phone. Now I know better. I could see it coming up from the periphery through omissions and distractions.  I just chose to ignore them whilst I convinced myself that everything was going to play out differently this time around.  I thought I was clever enough to have my happy ever after with him second time around. I thought I had suffered enough to be rewarded.  I thought I had worked hard enough to earn this bonus.  I thought I was pretty enough to hold his gaze. Special enough to keep the conversation going a little longer.

There were pebbles and rocks in the painful road and some flicked up hard and smacked me but I never thought to stop and evaluate my ride: I just kept peddling harder and harder. Whilst my self esteem stung and bruised from each time I doubted myself and made his choices my fault.

I fell off my bike and landed head long into a crack called grief that had an ongoing subscription to Friday afternoons unravelling on an unmade bed. When I fell I stopped making myself a priority and the sensitivity began to show. An intolerance to talking, walking, thinking, remembering that grew louder and louder. Other peoples happiness felt like a bitter pill you take without water to wash it down.  my howl was stuck in my throat.

I fell off my bike and my energy leaked out of my tyres till I was flat. My inner pump was missing in action and so I sat there on the kerb side, staring and comparing to see where I had gone wrong.  Was I not tall enough, young enough, pretty enough, blonde enough, hip enough, a bitch enough. Enough already.

I fell off my bike because I was supposed to. I wasn’t meant to be with him anymore.  He wasn’t up for the job of being my man. He stopped choosing me as his woman.  My seat was too high but I was shrinking to fit. The road had run it’s course a while back when the smooth bitumen of conversations, love making, late night pizza and smooth tunes on the stereo, gave way to ditches of missing in action for weeks at a time, pot holes of texting instead of talking and an avalanche of moments upon moments not shared anymore. There was no note but the Herman Hesse quote tattooed on the inside of my heart.

“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”

-Herman Hesse