Grief’s World

We’re in January, my bicycle and I. Her steel frame and my enamel one flash past stoplights in our small town, my hands numbing to her handlebars as wind sweeps across our bodies. We are grieving, or rather, I am grieving, and she is pulling me through. Together we pedal and pedal our perfect action-reaction, action-reaction across broken asphalt and early evenings. There is no path out of grief—but my bicycle, she is finding a way to its center.

Grief is more canyon than shadow. More embodied than ethereal. Thicker than the ocean. Lighter than air. Grief: a place, perhaps; or a time of day — the last light, a slipping sun. Maybe a body, thick with fur and breath. In grief, as in most scenarios, a bicycle is handy.

When I first entered this particular grief—a break-up with someone I’d loved and been loved by for years—I left my bicycle at home. In the immediacy, I needed only to feel the action, action, action of my footsteps down the night-dark street. Then, in the lonely days and weeks that followed, I would trade my body for my bicycle’s, trying to stay one step ahead of the day, a note ahead of grief, whose moment still gleamed on the horizon behind us. 

On Seventh Street, we’re breathing heavily, nearing the top of a hill. On Fourth, we brake hard at an empty intersection, catch our breath over rocky bumps in the road. All around us, the earth breathes as we push through the air. The land contracts in the swell of winter cold. I feel my skin shrinking as my lungs and heart expand. 

Oh body, oh body. Body-belonging-beloved. Beloved body, belonging. Behold.

In the past, I would lie awake in deep blue shadow, having interrupted mine and my now former partner’s—we’ll call them L—love-making with a glassy look and rapid deep breaths. My mind would fly away from my body, who would call me back by steadily naming the world around me. Blue shadow on my lover’s knee. Coffee sack on the wall. The more minute the detail, the better. Twelve hairs on my knuckle. The bottom-left corner of a blanket catching moonlight. Observation was the charm to ground my mind in the worthiness of my own pleasure, the safety of my desire. Good sex was a good place to come back to, though we’d hardly ever continue after I’d have one of my spells. I must thank the body for being a tether. My body, and L’s.

Body beloved, belong.

But the body is no cinder-block in grief. It stiffens, then crumples, pushes its chair back and sweeps out of the house in shock and silence. The body is not to be trusted, and the mind is already far away. 

Grief shatters. It opens the land, seizes the body-mind, and dives into the well.

The wind is an ocean in my ears. My bicycle and I are shooting down a steep hill, descending into grief’s lair. My bike light gleams through the depths. Buried in the sediment are stories of loss, longing, wonderment, inevitability, regret, helplessness. I spy my mother’s letters to my father after their arranged marriage, sent while she waited on a visa to join him in America; then a younger version of myself, finding the letters in her closet before she hid them away again. I pedal by my child-self visiting a lost tooth’s grave site, then spot myself as a teenager, jumping a fence, running from home. 

The mud grows stickier, denser. Scenes from my life are interspersed with scenarios I’ve never lived. I pass by landscapes decimated by drones, families receiving the shells of their sons from Guantánamo. A man shivers under a blanket on the steps of a church in Harvard Square. The last white rhinoceros, utterly alone, gazes at me from the muddy walls I cycle past. A Palestinian child watches his home bulldozed in East Jerusalem. The earth is stacked with elegies.

In grief’s wild waters, breath comes in gasps, or exits the top of the lungs, shuddering like a primordial vibrato. Like breath in the midst of sobs or at the end of a sprint, grief emerges, triumphant and unavoidable, a calling to life. Even subconsciously, all the time, our bodies exhale, then pause in the wake of loss, then inhale and inhale the world. 

A few days into my grief, my bicycle and I swept up and down the quiet neighborhood hills, shrieking our together-wings—our togethering—into the evening. We followed the railroad, a long line of trees, the pale yellow horizon. A few months ago, there would have been thousands of crows singeing the sheet of clouds overhead, but by now they’ve flown off. At the end of January, home is scarce. Slowly, my bicycle is letting me go, feeding out the line, watching to make sure I come back. I ride with one hand now, soon none. Sometimes two hands and no feet, legs stretched out on either side of our body. In this way, anything is possible. We are us and one of us, at least, is steel and paint and rubber. Everlasting: a good quality for an anchor, though mine travels with me through the sea. 

A week after our break-up, I slept at our home alone for the second night. When L came to say goodnight, we sat in bed and dreamed our breaking could be beautiful, repairable. I whispered and cried. We even kissed—slowly, like strangers, after I asked terrible questions. We did not make love, though my mind leapt and leapt at the thought. They left me to sleep alone that night as I had asked, though my desire for their comfort—a craving that persisted despite the fact that they were now a source of hurt—still stormed within my body.

Far down the throat of grief’s darkness, I finally pull my brakes into a stop. Tumbling off my bicycle into the still air, I stand with one hand steadying myself on her frame. All around me, grief’s evidence shimmers in the walls, and then I kneel on the soft floor, start to dig. 

Perhaps startled by the commotion of my bike, wheels ticking and lime green crate bouncing behind me, a massive bear emerges from the shadows. Grief, its teeth and eyes glinting in the barely-there glow, stands over me as I sift through the dirt. At every tchak of my trowel, grief leans a little closer. I’m terrified, but I don’t stop digging. My bicycle lays next to me, keeping a watchful eye, ready to throw her thin turquoise frame in the way if anything turns ugly. Eventually, grief snuffles down to take a nap. I put down the trowel and close my eyes. I’ve slept here before, next to grief, swallowed by its den. For months and months. But my bicycle flashes in the corner of my eye, calling me back. We can’t sleep here, she says. Let’s go home.

That night, instead of sleeping, I stepped outside. Soon my feet were on my bicycle pedals, and the wheels flew over the frozen, nubbly ground. In our speed, I felt an inhuman lightness, and grief’s world disappeared as the crocus-yellow siding of the house I shared with L winked out of sight. 

Trowel bouncing in the crate, we ride and ride. Night hangs its curtain over us, so we stop on the road. I topple off my bike, onto a field. 

There is no grief without transformation. No transformation without terror, no terror without curiosity. I don’t know who I’ll be in the morning—where or how I’ll find grief again, stalking my periphery, wondering and staring. What I’ll look like, in what field I’ll find myself in, or in what canyon wet and dark as tar after rain. I am human, that much I know, but grief demands I change. 

In the field, I wake up to pre-dawn stars and planets. Ursa Major glints at me from the sky—the bear is back. My bicycle gleams turquoise in response. All around me, stars tell stories of loss and longing, and I realize I am back in the cave I thought I had left yesterday. Grief lifts a paw off the curtain of night sky, clambers into the field where I stand. I am still in grief’s house. My work is inescapable. I pull the trowel from my bike crate and once again begin to carve my mark in the earth.

Now that I’ve acknowledged grief has found me, I must dig the canyon that connects me to a whole world. Grief’s world. Which also happens to be the world I live in, with my aching heart, with L, and with every other animal and alive thing. I, in the canyon I’ve made, digging until I reach the hand and paw and claw and fin and soil and twig and rope and electric current and hydrogen atom and steel blade and twist of fire that has ever known the kind of sorrow that longs and longs. This sorrow that desires to touch, gently, the sorrow of every other sorrow-creature. This grief, I mean. It breathes. In every breath, a million miles.

Grief watches as I sift through the dirt. I want to know what else grief has buried here in the earth. My bicycle watches nervously, knowing I might never stop, might get stuck here in the field with grief and our mutual curiosity. At some point, she intervenes and flashes at me to go. I understand—to dig through all of grief’s treasures in one day might be too much for my being to hold.

I toss my leg over her solid frame, capable of far more than my human one, grateful.

Beloved body, who walks the earth, and lies in its sand and on its ocean, and combs its grass, and flies down its slopes. How I love the shape of you and your marvelous function—bone and brain and blood, timorous and tingling in constant reformation. I hate and love the grief that tears us open to the world and sacrifices our heart for the hearts of everything around us. In grief, I cannot remain I. 

Body, we must inhabit the world by becoming it.

After L left and I rode my bicycle through the night, I eventually returned to our empty house. I shivered in the clear cold, breath calming as I locked up my bicycle outside. I didn’t want to come back to that place, but I needed to sleep somewhere, and I had asked to be alone. 

Except—in grief’s world, I am not alone. To feel my own grief is to open myself to all the myriad multitudes of griefs that exist in and beyond my body. 

That night, I wanted grief to let me be. I knew, on some level, that I’d return to it soon, but its weight was grinding down on my shoulders and I could not survive that deep in its discomfort. If the world was grief’s, I wanted no part in it. I held onto my lonely body, my lonely heart, and tried desperately not to change.

I’m back on my bike, and in the distance I can hear the bear chanting under its breath. Devotion, devotion, devotion, grief murmurs. I can’t tell if grief is talking to me or to itself, or both. Grief lumbers after us, but my bicycle carries me far and fast. We are stably balanced together, and she touches the earth so I don’t have to. I lay my trowel in the milk crate attached to the back, and let my bicycle’s wheels carry me past L, past my frail relationship to my mother and the slow eyes of my sickly cat, past flayed-open mountains and an acidifying sea. I think, grief demands too much of us. Transformation? Devotion, not only to ours, but to each other’s sorrow? 

The world is a repository of grief, and I cannot touch it for fear of changing into something unrecognizable to myself. In this terror, I have questions: what am I afraid I will become? Why am I afraid I will become? 

Grief’s voice carries far in the recesses of my chest. The water in my body rearranges itself to the drumbeat: devotion, devotion. I know that I am full of fear, and as yet unprepared to say goodbye to myself as grief’s devotion demands. I know that with my bicycle, we’ll swoop and sweep through the streets, switching back across steep downhills, panting up others. Her handlebars will salt with my hand-sweat and silt. I’ll sit up straight, barely touching the handles, and we’ll traverse miles in the shifting light. 

Maybe, in this way, we’ll change. Her paint will flake and my skin will slough off in the wind. That, too, is becoming. There’s a devotion to the pedaling, is my argument. I’m arguing, even in the running, the bicycling away from grief—we are tethered. If not to ourselves, to the bicycle. And the bicycle, to the earth. And the earth—everything that has ever been, has ever belonged or beheld—is grief’s.

The bear is gaining on us. I don’t know what grief will do to me, but after miles of flight on my bicycle, I feel strangely ready for its confrontation. Grief heaves breath through its damp black nostrils. I can hear it, close behind. Then—the click of its claws hooking into my crate.

I used to carry L like this, them on their skateboard and me on my bicycle, paired in speed through the city. 

I am not done digging, and grief knows this. My bicycle knows this too, but she’s determined to keep me moving. Wherever we stop next, I’ll touch the ground, take out my trowel and parse the stacked years of grief’s belongings. One day soon, I will be able to bury my sorrow in the layers of sediment, contribute my own to grief’s world without losing myself in the process. My bicycle and I will stop and start, stop and start until then.

Maybe this is the devotion grief wants from me. To keep digging, to return to its world, over and over, until I become part of it. 

In the yellow lamplight at the edge of the sidewalk, my bicycle-beacon is leaning against a signpost. Just past the window framing L’s overwintering lemon tree, she sits out the night. In the morning we’ll have places to go, bicycle-me, bicycle-we. Grief has caught up to us, of course, and we are all three of us leashed together on the line. And when the line pulls taut, we pull and pull. Bicycle-me, we carry our now companion over the miles. Eventually we fly—down bike paths, across intersections, through empty parks, up neighborhood streets. We fly and grief flies behind, pumping its own limbs, propelling us forward, holding us back.