leaving chicago

I cried openly on a boulder on the side of a crowded bike path while eating two cinnamon-chip scones.

As you can imagine, absolutely no one acknowledged me. People in the city are good at pretending they don’t see a giant woman with tears rolling out from her sunglasses eating two cinnamon-chip scones. Maybe they assumed I knew what I was doing, that I had this situation under control.  

Or maybe I was a ghost! 

I had absolutely nothing under control. My life was a swirling vortex. I had spent the last hour trying to leave the city, but I kept getting lost and ending up in the same place, a quarter-mile from Olive Oil’s house. It felt like a maddening dream.

I felt so lonely.

I had to say goodbye to a friend, and I wasn’t going to see another one until Montana. I met a person who felt connected to the same reality as me, and then I had to say goodbye to him too. I had checked my email and saw the name Ben Sagres, and I couldn’t bring myself to open the message, because the sight of his name made me feel like I’d chugged a pitcher of icewater. The worst part was how familiar it felt. This was how I felt all the time when we were still talking, I realized with shock. How had I managed to convince myself that this was okay?  

I slumped and sighed and let the tears crawl down my cheeks. Gazed over at Lucky, my sole companion. I felt like an animal at the zoo. My every action was public, and no one knew my name.

But.

I eventually found my way out of the city. The skyscrapers shrunk to suburbs that sank into unburnished land. I rode past tall grass and chain-link fences, through soft drifts of cottonwood fluff, to a town called Zion. The bike path dwindled to dirt and finally led me to a lonely little scrap of beach with smooth stones the color of olive oil and Himalayan sea salt, beneath a sunset like weak herbal tea.

I locked my bike, set up my tent, and crawled inside. Sighed. I’m sad. I recognize and honor that. And I told myself the ups and downs are two sides of the same coin. Trust the setbacks, ride them out. Without loneliness, friendship wouldn’t mean a thing.

Is it hard to ride your bike across the country?

Nights like this one, little man. Nights like this one.