Here’s what I learned in this process.

The most important thing about buying a bike is being able to articulate what you want to do with it.

When I walked into a store and asked about touring bikes, the most common response was to direct me to a hybrid style bike that’s not quite for touring and not quite for road riding. This would get me a lighter, possibly faster bike more suitable for riding around town, but it might cost me on the durability/repairability side and it isn’t built for carrying several days worth of gear. I don’t blame the sales guys. I expect out here they get a lot of people who think they want to do serious bike tours and limit themselves to touring bikes only to be disappointed by the bulk and relative lack of responsiveness when used for daily riding. But I’d done my research and I knew what I wanted. That said, it took me a while to learn to say “No, thanks, just show me your touring bikes.”

If a bike feels like home, it is home, and you likely won’t gain anything by continuing to look.

I admit it: for part of my search, I got seduced by the prospect of a beautiful bike. I had seen the bike and spoken at length to a very pleasant sales guy about it, but they didn’t have a floor model ready to ride. So in the meantime, I went to another store and tried out their selection of touring bikes. One of them felt like I could ride all day – which should have ended my search. But Store A had the prettier bike and, for roughly the same price, would do a full bike fitting. It seemed like the much wiser route. Only it turned out not to be.

No matter how experienced/knowledgeable the salesperson is, you are the only one who knows how your body feels and you are the only one who can say if a bike fits.

Rivendell Bicycle Works has some amazing articles on buying a touring bike. The best advice I got from the site was to ignore anyone who said that I would need to get used to a bike that felt wrong. If a bike fits, you will know fairly quickly, even if you can feel a few minor adjustments. It is very important to pay attention to this instinct.

I probably knew within about 5 minutes that the geometry of the pretty bike from Store A just didn’t work for my body. In fact, despite numerous adjustments over the course of an hour, I still felt cramped in the saddle, off balance, and generally unhappy. This is the opposite of what you need in a bike you intend (potentially, eventually) to ride for up to 100 km a day for multiple days.

The more disappointing aspect of this experience was the sales guy’s repeated failure to listen to what I cared about in a bike. There was no question that he knows far more about bicycles than I do, but he didn’t know me or the way I like to ride and he took no trouble to find out. In fact, he repeatedly tried to tell me that I did not actually want what I thought I wanted. I can’t say this made me inclined to trust him. Through a whole series of other incidents which take more words to describe than their pettiness warrants, I abandoned Store A with some resentment.

Every frustration is worth it when you know you have purchased the right bike.

After many months of research and several weeks of active searching, I bought the bicycle that felt like home. I know this is the right bike because I can ride for hours on one day – uphill, downhill, rough road, smooth road – and I still want to get on it the next day. It is my partner in pushing my limits. I’ll learn how to maintain it and repair it with my own hands as much as possible. I know that I couldn’t have come to this point by any other route.

But I hope I won’t have to buy another bike for many, many years.

You are part of an awakening. I blame the spring, the green, the shedding of insulation. I blame new eyes that are old eyes. I blame the stretching, strengthening muscles that mean less than an unfolding of a reconstituted heart. I blame sounds and songs and remembering how to play. Like this. I blame eyes and lips I may have loved once upon a time and never reconciled.

You are catalyst and coincident. Forgive me I can’t give you more than that.

I was acerbic, angry, and anxious. All at the front of the alphabet crowding out the rest of my time. Avoiding later adjectives as if they might implode against the pounding of fingertips. The aversion to sleep hums at grasshopper pitch. Though, of course, I am far away from grasshoppers and have to remember frog song in the evening.

Today is without sense. Without structure. Without song. I miss former lives, former loves, former dreams. These years are my reality. And I can’t bring them into order.

“That’s right, you feminist whore! I will fucking beat you.”

“Quit looking at me, bitch!”

“Get out of here, you moron.”

The man – I haven’t seen his face; eye contact seems injudicious – hurls the worst epithets he has at his disposal towards the woman who unthinkingly reached out to steady his body, lurching with a combination of bus breaks and alcohol.

The tirade lasts the span of two blocks. At the back of the bus, we – mostly women of the upper middle class – exchange flickering, uncertain glances. I am struck with the man’s language. Not the vulgarity, but the tone and nature of the words. All feminine and derogatory or implying a lack of mental facility. I am sure the rest of them, like me, feel the impulse to act and not to act. But what could any of us do?

At the next stop, the man decides to leave rather than wait for whatever enforcement service the bus driver has contacted. Despite his departure, we troop as a flock to the next bus that vaguely follows the route we need, trying to escape the malodor of echoing memory. But before we go, I see a young woman offer a tissue and some reassurance to the target of the man’s hostility.

Two days later, I am walking home from work with a friend. We pass a panhandler. I’ve seen him before. Sometimes I offer change; more often I walk past with murmured apology. This time I am absorbed in sharing an anecdote. His legs are stretched far into the sidewalk, so I must pay oblique attention to curve my path and avoid stepping on him.

His scream truncates my story: “Shut up! You talk too much!”

While my friend is startled, I am puzzled. Alarmed and detached. This may be the first time in my life I’ve been yelled at by a stranger. But two incidents, however unequal in threat, so close together begged analysis. I was in no danger during either event. The only thing ruffled was my sense of untouchability – which ought to be ruffled now and again.

You see, I love this city. The last time I fell in love with a city I didn’t know how to love with open eyes. I loved what I thought I saw – loved the products of my imagination. And perhaps this is what breaks love. The slow dissolution of fantasy. Perhaps that is why I left.

I have less theory, more experience this time. I know my love will not change the way this city moves. Will not weave small bridges between all the worlds trying to occupy the same space. This city will break my heart and mend it and break it again. I will allow it to create and disturb my comfort. Because loving a perfect space no longer satisfies me.

I am always intending to write you of large and small things. The words I horde in treasure boxes and the secret phrases of magnolias in bud. The world moves in ways I don’t accept, and so I’ve moved my heart into Victorian England, hoping for more than it can give. These barriers of time and place make no difference to a sentence, though perhaps I don’t connect it to the subtleties of dialogue. Streams only flow into larger rivers and can’t receive anything back. The mechanics of tributaries stretched into wispy metaphors.

Because it’s late, and in honour of the occasion, I’ve made myself a cup of camomile tea. And in my impatience, I will burn my tongue, unless some thought hangs on its expression until the steam subsides. The weather has been moody, bearing the burden of peevishness for me. I find myself opening in the lateness of March, the promise of a slow climb into warm weather. The smell of dampness has changed, and though I have stepped to spring attire just a touch too early, the morning chill remains less penetrating than it was. So my heart eases into the new green that lies just beyond the cherry blossoms.

I do not apologize for the opacity of this letter. I think you, of all people, know the meaning of these turnings of my mind. The chaotic sacrifice of sense on the altar of sound. Because this is me at some hours, just as the woman you knew once upon a time is me, and the uncertainty of tomorrow is also me. However you are, whatever you wish you knew, may your journey bring you occasions of peace. And always remember with love this woman with a pocketful of whimsy at the ready. I am yours faithfully,

Jessica

One of these friends included me in a tradition that his circle of friends keeps: on your birthday, you must identify the best thing about the last year and the worst thing about the last year. There is nothing novel or revolutionary about this exercise, but it was something I’d never done before. And in answering the question, my attitude turned a little sideways in a much needed way.

The worst part of the last year was the uncertainty leading up to our move out to Vancouver. We had decided we wanted to move; we picked Vancouver because I was likely to be able to keep my job. Except that I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone about when I could go or what I would be doing. Many a dark hour until I got a straight answer, booked the movers, and started packing in earnest.

The best part of the last year was much harder to pin down. In a year filled with new surroundings, new activities, and welcome incidental lifestyle changes, settling on the highest point is tough. So my answer was getting to see They Might Be Giants in a smallish venue. They opened the show with the song I’d had in my head all day, and then played the entirety of Flood, my favourite of their albums. To top it off, they finished up with an encore of my favourite sequence of mini-songs from Apollo 18. But many other experiences crowded into honorable mention, and today, I want to change my answer. But I won’t.

I’ve been restless lately. Feeling a bit directionless and out of touch. But maybe it’s just been a failure to take stock of all the wonderful people I interact with, and of the events and activities that fill my days. More dissatisfaction is ahead of me: I’m not sure I’m built to be content for long. But I’ll take this past year with its highs and lows. See what we can’t find in the next one.

What does a woman do with this time? Perhaps becomes a bit reflective. Perhaps finds old companions. Old thoughts. New thoughts. Strange places. Discovers tiny bits of the world again. Allows herself to untangle and exhale into something like real life, but more like imagination.

I’m harbouring some unproductive patterns, and the effort to break out seems immense. Somehow, the two-point-five metres between the couch and my desk has become an insurmountable distance, no matter how many rules I try to impose on myself. Then, even if I’ve made it to the desk, a thousand distractions lurk between logging into my laptop and opening any word processing software. Even as I’m slogging through quagmires of aggregators, clicking link after link to view pointless images, I know that stringing phrases into sentences — however horrible, however few — is a better use for my time than what I’m doing. But there’s always one more link to click, one more comment thread to read, and then it’s too late to go to bed early. Again.

So I write this because I want to return to something without going backwards. Whatever I was writing 10 years ago is not what I will produce now, under these circumstances, with these surroundings. I’m no longer interested in adhering to a schedule or delivering n posts per week. This space is no longer a goal in itself. But it’s as good a place as any to experiment with putting one word next to another, just to see how they fit.

So the intent was always to post something once a week. Not just anything though. Something good. And fuck if that plan didn’t seize up my creative muscles until I was just barely getting by on what I could squeeze out for the unbelievably easy to please office crowd. Between perfectionism, feeling generally uncommunicative, and a couple of extracurricular editing contracts, I have been pretty well silent here for nearly a month.

Someone at work today told me it’s winter. Which is impossible because the world is still green and yellow and red and orange. These West Coasters don’t understand my winters, and I’m not sure I understand theirs. But I am in love with this lazy autumn. My street is littered with big orange-gold leaves, and just today, I conceded that the mornings are a bit too chilly for my heavy summer jacket and shrugged into my light wool coat. The rains will start soon enough, and I’ll have to learn to deal with the damp heavy darkness. It’s amazing what the sight of green grass can do for the soul at this time of year.

Somewhere else it’s NaNoWriMo. And Movember. But I am participating in a different kind of contest. A photo challenge to document aspects of my world with a different focus each day. I don’t have any aspirations to join the ranks of my many photographer friends. It simply seems like a good opportunity to re-engage with the world I find myself moving through. I’ve been disconnected and distant so far. Reluctant to force my way in anywhere. But it’s time to connect with this city a bit more. Learn it for what it is and isn’t. Take us both for what we are.

I keep forgetting to write. But not exactly forgetting. Because my voice my voice my voice keeps getting jammed in all these foreign frequencies. And I don’t remember how to speak outside code. Once upon a time, I knew the translation. Ways to be understood on the fuzziest line. Crisp diction and garbled messages repeating and repeating on remote towers. The distinction between here and there lost in several fractions of a second. We never knew how to compensate for the delay, and sound has never yet turned a corner without help. We were alone in static, in the hiss of a lost line. Clipped click of radio pulse.

10-4, 10-35. Control, out.