My Bike and I Had a Fight and My Bike Won
by Sophia Frank
About three weeks into quarantine I bought a bike on impulse. The purchase was born out of a fantasy—helped along by a podcast about WWII spies on bikes—in which I would be fearless and helpful if I only had a bicycle to get around faster, now that the subways were down.
To be fully honest, it’s a miracle I even made it home from the bike shop that day.
I do know how to ride a bike.
But learning to ride a bike as a child was a teensy bit traumatic for me. My younger brother learned before me (rude) and I was last among all my friends to ditch the training wheels. The only reason I learned at all was because of a much-anticipated third grade camping trip on which we all got to bring along our bikes. So, the summer before third grade, my dad took me to a quiet bike path where he chased and yelled at me until I finally got the hang of it. I may not have fully taken into account unhealed psychic wounds when I was imagining myself as a biking badass conquering the streets of Brooklyn.
The old adage is definitely true: you never forget how to ride a bike. But in the intervening twenty years since third grade, I had apparently forgotten how to stop a bike.
Poor balance, combined with a total lack of core strength from quarantining and not once exercising during the last four years of my life, made it difficult to work out exactly how to stabilize myself when the bike wasn’t moving. I’d come to a stop, try to put my foot down, sort of miss my step, wobble, and then very slowly and sadly tilt to one side until I just let go and stumbled off the bike entirely.
Undaunted, I told myself that I just needed some practice. The four friends I called in a tailspin of buyer’s remorse also reassured me that practice would help.
I went out the next day to practice stopping my bike around my neighborhood. An older Orthodox couple paused to ask if I was okay. A car honked to get me to move; I lost my balance and fully fell over onto the asphalt. It gave a group of little kids a good laugh.
Wasn’t everyone supposed to be inside right now? What were all these people doing out in a pandemic??
I made it another block before I lost my spark. The fantasy was dead. I decided I would shame-walk the bike home. In my despair, I may have stopped too suddenly. I didn’t go over the handlebars (that would have been too punk rock) — instead I came forward off the seat and slammed into the crossbar.
I’d like to pause here to directly address any reader who may have testicles and tell you to shut it. My vision went gray when I hit that bar. The seam of my denim cutoffs (why, Sophia) only compounded the issue. Luckily this incident occurred on an empty stretch of block and I limped my way home in relative dignity.
I slowly disinfected my bike and shoes with Clorox wipes and washed my hands for a full forty seconds instead of the recommended twenty. When I decided everything was clean, I took a peek.
As a woman who has had a semi-regular period since she was fourteen, I never expected to panic at the sight of a little blood down there.
But I did.
I immediately lay down on the floor of my bathroom. I felt dizzy. I couldn’t call a doctor: “Hi, I know there’s a pandemic going on but I smacked my vagina on my bike and now it’s bleeding, could you pause your lifesaving work to take a look?”
Instead I texted a knowledgeable friend who told me to leave it alone, and be careful for about a week, and everything should be fine.
I remained on the bathroom floor for the rest of the day, thinking I should have been more grateful for all the orgasms I’d had in the past — because obviously I was never ever going to have one again. I thought about how in middle school a boy told me that if you cut the inside of both of your fingers and then let the two cuts heal while touching your fingers together, they’d heal stuck together. That was probably going to happen to me. I would get some gross infection in my crotch and then also contract the virus. I thought about how selfish I was to mourn this tiny loss of sensation when people were literally dying. I thought about what a terrible person I was to be sad about something so insignificant. Then I got mad because the patriarchy made me think my orgasms are insignificant.
I rolled over to look at the bike I’d left on the hallway floor. I moved to New York from California because it was a place where a terrible driver with a tendency to daydream, like myself, could get far with her own two feet and a Metro card. I bought the bike to regain the independence I felt I’d lost in lockdown. Now it was just a reminder that I would always be that terrified eight-year-old; that I was the only person in the entire world who had forgotten to ride a bike. I was stuck, immobile, unessential, and unhelpful.
Three days later I was basically healed. No apparent nerve damage either.
But I didn’t want to get back on the bike.
About two weeks before the publication of this essay, I had a panic attack. I hadn’t been outside in five days. I was greasy, pale, and losing my mind. I couldn’t take one more second of being inside, of being angry, of being afraid, of not knowing what my wobbly little life out here in Brooklyn would look like in the next few days, let alone the next few years.
I was not thinking of my vagina.
I took the bike out.
I made it to the Brooklyn Library before I had to stop and yank the mask off my face to catch my breath. After eight weeks of lying around, doing nothing but smoking and being melancholy, I was out of shape, and my lungs were deeply displeased with the sudden strain. But I only fell over once, and that was more due to lack of oxygen than poor balance.
Oh, and my clitoris was totally fine.
Sophia Frank is a Brooklyn based writer and performer. After graduating from NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing in 2014, she wrote, produced and performed in two strange plays with her producing partner Bailey Nasetta One Upon A Roach, and -but some of us. Frank also performed off-Broadway in a production of Medea/Britney at HERE Arts Center last fall in a partnership with What Will The Neighbors Say and Cloudbusters. She is a retired bartender and M.F.A. Candidate in Fiction at Columbia University.
