(An excerpt of this essay has been published in Poetry Midwest.)
Midlife is the old age of youth and the youth of old age. – Proverb.
Our eyes are the last of our senses to evolve. How long does it take for our hearts to form? My younger sister, Krisey, will tell me a year later, during the fifth week of her second pregnancy that her baby is the size of a sesame seed, still a cluster of cells, and it’s during this stage of development the heart will divide into chambers and begin to pump blood. I wondered, in that critical week, if the emotional connections to the heart can be stunted, or if that’s purely an adult thing. I thought about this cluster of cells, a pinpoint of life pushing against the walls of the cell, and what strength and endurance the cells had to have in order to grow, expand—all of who will acquire the ability to store desire and memory in a blind darkness. A pounding coordination had begun in the body, for a body. But that’s not what I am thinking about, as I climb onto the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle for the first time.
Midlife is the old age of youth and the youth of old age. – Proverb.
Our eyes are the last of our senses to evolve. How long does it take for our hearts to form? My younger sister, Krisey, will tell me a year later, during the fifth week of her second pregnancy that her baby is the size of a sesame seed, still a cluster of cells, and it’s during this stage of development the heart will divide into chambers and begin to pump blood. I wondered, in that critical week, if the emotional connections to the heart can be stunted, or if that’s purely an adult thing. I thought about this cluster of cells, a pinpoint of life pushing against the walls of the cell, and what strength and endurance the cells had to have in order to grow, expand—all of who will acquire the ability to store desire and memory in a blind darkness. A pounding coordination had begun in the body, for a body. But that’s not what I am thinking about, as I climb onto the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle for the first time.
My fingers are linked and locked through the belt loops of your jeans—a secure place my hands have discovered after holding on to you too tight and accidentally tickling you out of your motorcycle concentration.
The winged parts of the hipbones, the iliac, expand outward, like a butterfly. This pelvic cavity is designed like a cave to protect the potential life that sleeps deep inside. This winged amphitheatre of bone is one of the six major cavities in the human body. Resting between the expansions of this bone, fallopian flowers still bud in a dark field of my muscle.
The winged parts of the hipbones, the iliac, expand outward, like a butterfly. This pelvic cavity is designed like a cave to protect the potential life that sleeps deep inside. This winged amphitheatre of bone is one of the six major cavities in the human body. Resting between the expansions of this bone, fallopian flowers still bud in a dark field of my muscle.
My hips hook my pants in place. I touch my stomach and imagine the flatness I know is just beneath a layer of fat, then and rest my hands back on my hips. I am made from an outline of ash and bone, but my mind has the power to be in all places of my body at once. I’m not as robotic as I feel sometimes in this modern world. A robot has neither a heart nor hipbones.
Hipbones are often overlooked and hardly a topic of conversation, unless you become one of the people who’ve become dependent on a walker or cane after a fracture. I read recently that medical experts predict a future epidemic of hip fractures due to the aging U.S. population—what an onslaught of broken butterfly wings!
A thin, faux rawhide braid, no more in width than a pencil, frayed from cheapness and clashes against my new white pants, now, a size too big. I like wearing these pants, especially when I am near you. Suddenly, I am a long-legged exotic bird. My feathers ruffle with the midsummer winds. We stand together in front of your chilled butter colored house. I’ve spent most of my life waiting for this moment…to live carelessly in the grass. You hand me a helmet and tell me it’s expensive. I am afraid I might ruin it, but how, by crashing? Earlier I confessed, motorcycles make me nervous, and now, as you hand me my helmet, I think about how I could damage the whole evening by leaning too hard on a turn and tipping the bike over us. I know it’s possible to lean too far into excitement and pay the price with your life. When I was sixteen, my father told me how to ride on the back of motorcycles. The part I remember most: how passengers on a bike should take curves or turns, “Don’t lean to far or force it. Just relax…follow the bike, Pilar.”
A thin, faux rawhide braid, no more in width than a pencil, frayed from cheapness and clashes against my new white pants, now, a size too big. I like wearing these pants, especially when I am near you. Suddenly, I am a long-legged exotic bird. My feathers ruffle with the midsummer winds. We stand together in front of your chilled butter colored house. I’ve spent most of my life waiting for this moment…to live carelessly in the grass. You hand me a helmet and tell me it’s expensive. I am afraid I might ruin it, but how, by crashing? Earlier I confessed, motorcycles make me nervous, and now, as you hand me my helmet, I think about how I could damage the whole evening by leaning too hard on a turn and tipping the bike over us. I know it’s possible to lean too far into excitement and pay the price with your life. When I was sixteen, my father told me how to ride on the back of motorcycles. The part I remember most: how passengers on a bike should take curves or turns, “Don’t lean to far or force it. Just relax…follow the bike, Pilar.”
I focus on your smile as you gently adjust the strap so it fits comfortably under my chin. Your fingers are flirting with my neck. I let out a little laugh.
“I trust you Richard with the bike,” I say, awkward in my nervousness, not anymore about riding, but being in kissing distance from you, You reassure me the helmet is European and it’s the best in its class. Suddenly, I can hardly contain my happiness. My fear of riding a motorcycle surrenders to our bodies against one another. There are diamonds, naked to the eye, floating behind the veils that hang above us in the early evening sky.
I ask you, if at forty-one years old, you’ve had a midlife crisis. The older I become, the more I hear about this crisis: divorces, affairs, dating younger people, growing beards or shaving them off, depression, recession, losing hair, getting hair, face lifts, tummy tucks, and random purchases. You say you’ve already had one, the crisis, which happened shortly after your divorce and that’s when you purchased a Harley and BMW cruising bike. You say the only color for a motorcycle is black. Five years later, riding is still important to you, so maybe it wasn’t a phase or crisis, but a germ that outgrew the greenhouse. I need to pay attention to people; I tend to shrivel in a crisis. I wonder what my midlife crisis will be, or if I’ve already it. My heart turned inside out and flattened itself against the earth, listening for anything in my efforts trying to define what love is and what love isn’t for my thesis. I had to live it to understand it. Is there any other way to really understand something? At the time, I would have rather died than lived with my ears and eyes turned away from the truth. I think about the book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wished I had read it—with the rest of the class—years ago at the junior college. I think it’s a book on morals. I wondered if it has helped anyone through a midlife crisis. Now, at the end of my thirties, maybe it’s not too late, just in case the real midlife crisis is around the corner. What I remember most about my English classes in junior college was that I couldn’t keep up with the reading assignments, so I faked it. Everything distracted me off the page, even the sound of my breath. I’d sit in class for weeks, three chapters behind. I didn’t have a clue as to what was being said. A lot can be said for nodding your head while making eye contact with the teacher; it can make a difference in a grade. A year later, I met a teacher, Mr. Farve, at the junior college, who changed my life. “Write in your textbooks. Learn to be an active reader!” He’d passionately shout, sweat rolling down his forehead, as he punched his fist through academic clouds. As soon as I began writing in my textbooks my G.P.A. began to climb towards the honor roll. Suddenly, I love to read again.
I want to know more of you. I do know you’re a romantic: You snap photographs of the world and capture what your hands cannot collect or bring back. You display your travels: photo albums, four-colored pictures framed on your living room walls, smooth river rocks housed in glass boxes from a sidewalk vendor in Mexico. All of it makes me forget where we are. I feel absorbed in the colors of your travels. I have forgotten we’re sitting on your leather couch in a suburban town in California, branded by country-western traditions nestled in the Central Valley. You show me one photo album after album, visually courting my heart. It works. You have the ability to hold my attention, instantly. You store sunsets in your mind I have yet to discover. The bird in me returns. I resume in a V-formation and take the lead; I never look back. I am either a poor leader, or one who knows exactly what she wants. In these windows of flight, my wings rattle open, like quills fresh from a pot of ink.
The stoplight blinks from green to yellow. We ease our way to reach a complete stop. The light flashes to red. The engine from the motorcycle rumbles beneath my body—all other noise is filtered out. We wait. I could hug you from behind forever. My body remains frozen, as not to move the bike, creating a shaky start once the light turns green. With a helmet head, and my peripheral vision now cumbersome, I try to keep my eyes fixed straight ahead.
I ask you, if at forty-one years old, you’ve had a midlife crisis. The older I become, the more I hear about this crisis: divorces, affairs, dating younger people, growing beards or shaving them off, depression, recession, losing hair, getting hair, face lifts, tummy tucks, and random purchases. You say you’ve already had one, the crisis, which happened shortly after your divorce and that’s when you purchased a Harley and BMW cruising bike. You say the only color for a motorcycle is black. Five years later, riding is still important to you, so maybe it wasn’t a phase or crisis, but a germ that outgrew the greenhouse. I need to pay attention to people; I tend to shrivel in a crisis. I wonder what my midlife crisis will be, or if I’ve already it. My heart turned inside out and flattened itself against the earth, listening for anything in my efforts trying to define what love is and what love isn’t for my thesis. I had to live it to understand it. Is there any other way to really understand something? At the time, I would have rather died than lived with my ears and eyes turned away from the truth. I think about the book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wished I had read it—with the rest of the class—years ago at the junior college. I think it’s a book on morals. I wondered if it has helped anyone through a midlife crisis. Now, at the end of my thirties, maybe it’s not too late, just in case the real midlife crisis is around the corner. What I remember most about my English classes in junior college was that I couldn’t keep up with the reading assignments, so I faked it. Everything distracted me off the page, even the sound of my breath. I’d sit in class for weeks, three chapters behind. I didn’t have a clue as to what was being said. A lot can be said for nodding your head while making eye contact with the teacher; it can make a difference in a grade. A year later, I met a teacher, Mr. Farve, at the junior college, who changed my life. “Write in your textbooks. Learn to be an active reader!” He’d passionately shout, sweat rolling down his forehead, as he punched his fist through academic clouds. As soon as I began writing in my textbooks my G.P.A. began to climb towards the honor roll. Suddenly, I love to read again.
I want to know more of you. I do know you’re a romantic: You snap photographs of the world and capture what your hands cannot collect or bring back. You display your travels: photo albums, four-colored pictures framed on your living room walls, smooth river rocks housed in glass boxes from a sidewalk vendor in Mexico. All of it makes me forget where we are. I feel absorbed in the colors of your travels. I have forgotten we’re sitting on your leather couch in a suburban town in California, branded by country-western traditions nestled in the Central Valley. You show me one photo album after album, visually courting my heart. It works. You have the ability to hold my attention, instantly. You store sunsets in your mind I have yet to discover. The bird in me returns. I resume in a V-formation and take the lead; I never look back. I am either a poor leader, or one who knows exactly what she wants. In these windows of flight, my wings rattle open, like quills fresh from a pot of ink.
The stoplight blinks from green to yellow. We ease our way to reach a complete stop. The light flashes to red. The engine from the motorcycle rumbles beneath my body—all other noise is filtered out. We wait. I could hug you from behind forever. My body remains frozen, as not to move the bike, creating a shaky start once the light turns green. With a helmet head, and my peripheral vision now cumbersome, I try to keep my eyes fixed straight ahead.
My helmet bumps against yours when you shift gears. Click! You become so attractive to me by the way your hand moves in coordination to shifting gears. There is something so masculine about this coordination for speed. I apologize into the rushing wind about letting our helmets click, “Sorry.” Sorry, I was hypnotized by your right hand. I think you know what I said, but at the next red light you nicely tell me not to let the helmets hit against each other. Each time you shift gears my neck tenses as I try not to let our helmets touch, or stare too long at your hand. I must stay alert. My eyes peek behind my right shoulder and down at the asphalt blasting past us. We make our way off the city streets and onto a freeway. I forget to tell you that I don’t do freeways on motorcycles. Nothing shields me, except my helmet and your backside. One wrong move and I could be flung like a rag doll, tumbling into mid air, scuff my skin off and face down in a pool of spit and gravel.
We finally exit the freeway and travel through unassigned and sleepy county roads I’ve never been on. We roll to another stop sign. There are no cars in sight, but you still come to a complete stop and look left and right, twice, before we take off. On the road in front of us is a pile of trash: illegal dumping. Someone has set it on fire: a couch, bags of garbage, a headless tree, plastic chairs. It’s a post-domestic bonfire. You tell me whoever set the fire might be watching us from behind the trees. I pretend I am whispering into the curves of your ear, my words slipping, letter by letter drifting forever into your canal, instead I’m trying to speak through the layers of plastic and foam of your helmet, “Let’s get out here.” We leave the burning mess and zigzag up a small mountain in the distance. At the top, we pause to watch the early-evening sky: Blue begins to shift into black and the stars haven’t yet floated to the surface. I think this is how love is supposed to feel. My body is still vibrating from the bike; I can’t tell if it’s a rush or a sense of exhaustion that I feel. The last time I felt this I was standing in Manhattan for the first time. My knees want to buckle. I shift my attention to the five variations of blue in front of us, all of them transforming into new shades the longer we stand before the sky. If this is love, I’m in the center of it, and I wonder, if you’d catch me if I lost my balance and fell backwards into this backdrop of blue.
You point out the moon, saying you take as many photographs of it as you can, sometimes with a tripod. I see worship in your eyes. I want to ask you, do you love what you cannot touch, but I don’t say a word. I wonder if you feel the same way about women. I look at you and smile. I don’t want to scare you by probing into your heart. I can only pay attention to your fascinations…this is what new love likes to do. I wonder if it’s the reflection of the moon that draws you. Do you see the male or female images across the forehead of the moon? There’s a tribe, somewhere in southwestern Africa, who are closely related to the Bushmen that worship the luna, or moon. The word “lunatic” comes from the word luna, aligned with the myth that if someone stared at the moon long enough it would drive them mad. For centuries the moon (and sun) has: held poets and philosophers captive; created superstition; aided in love; worked on the behalf of shapeshifting; aided the weak with the willpower to make life-changing decisions; marriage proposal; influenced the planting and harvesting crops; set chain of reactions amongst individuals to rebel against their virtues, only to blame it on a full moon.
You are luna to me. In the week we’ve been dating, you’ve had the power to hold my attention—all with a simple look. I move from your eyes to your mouth, which always appears to be on the verge of a smile. I soak up your side profile in the remaining light—your forehead, the bridge of your nose, your lips, the way the corners of your smile curl in. You’re a mountainous outline; your rivers are dry, beds of sand outlined with billowy sweet sage. I can almost smell the salt wafting through the air.
I never tell you that we have the same nose, but it’s true. Our nose is neither too big nor small for our face, and when we kiss, passion comfortably secures into place. You turn to me as if you’re about to say something to me—you must have felt me staring at you. Your eyes always seem to hold sweet skepticism. Later I take this behavior as proof that you are really listening to me when I talk. But this time, neither of us are talking; instead, you give me a quick kiss on the lips and turn to walk towards the bike. It’s time for us to go.
We head down the mountain on the bike. By now, we’ve been riding for over an hour and I convince myself that I’m getting used to the bike. But in reality, I am exhausted from having to be so still and alert. My hips are sore and I can’t wait to lie down, decompress. At a stoplight, you reach your left arm back for my shin. You gently squeeze it, as if to tell me I did great on the back of the Harley. I see you smile in your left handlebar mirror. I smile, tugging on your belt loops where my fingers are still looped and locked.
We head down the mountain on the bike. By now, we’ve been riding for over an hour and I convince myself that I’m getting used to the bike. But in reality, I am exhausted from having to be so still and alert. My hips are sore and I can’t wait to lie down, decompress. At a stoplight, you reach your left arm back for my shin. You gently squeeze it, as if to tell me I did great on the back of the Harley. I see you smile in your left handlebar mirror. I smile, tugging on your belt loops where my fingers are still looped and locked.
On the way back to your house I think about how I trust you at every intersection, stoplight, pothole, and patch of sand the bike’s wheels roll over. I think about how you were a paramedic for many years, and how today you teach paramedics and emergency medical technicians about safety and updated procedures. You’re a quality assurance manager; you tell me you work for our local ambulance company for over ten years, now at a desk job, which you seem content. So I know if there’s an emergency, I couldn’t be with a better person. And here I am with a delayed response that I agreed to ride on the back of a motorcycle. Could I be a Harley girlfriend? Is this me? I’m not officially your girlfriend. I guess that part has to come first.
Once we arrive to your house we pop off our helmets. Our bodies are alive with vibration. We are sticky and itchy with anticipation for our first beer. Our mouths, clever like serpents, have the power to fold air, as we draw closer, kissing one another’s ear. I find an electric silence with your kiss, until you struggle for breath, and then, I know you’ve lost yourself to the floral garden I’ve planted in my hair.
Once we arrive to your house we pop off our helmets. Our bodies are alive with vibration. We are sticky and itchy with anticipation for our first beer. Our mouths, clever like serpents, have the power to fold air, as we draw closer, kissing one another’s ear. I find an electric silence with your kiss, until you struggle for breath, and then, I know you’ve lost yourself to the floral garden I’ve planted in my hair.
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