I know I said I was going to forget about it, but while cruising the bike posts on craigslist, I found a $25 Free Spirit that I had to have.
I fell in love with Free Spirits when I was working at boys camp a few years ago, and they had a spare one that we could ride around the campus.
I have a distinct memory of rolling down the dirt road on a sunny early summer afternoon, wishing to never let the feeling past, and admiring the beauty of the bicycle.
I couldn’t resist the chance to have a blue free spirit while living here.
The world is so much more alive when you are on a bicycle.
You could be in a total shithole of a place, having the shittiest day, but a bike ride, especially at night, will pick you up.
And in a city that I have yet to warm up to, and don’t know if I will ever feel at home in, it seemed like a lovely bicycle was in order to make DC seem right.
The bike was mine as soon as I could make it out to the Virginia suburbs, some 30 miles away. My friend Liz was willing to drive me out and store the bike on her rack. The night we drove out, it was pouring rain, and we got lost in shopping-complex America an exit or two before the one we were suppose to take. We tried putting the bike on in the rain, and before we hit the highway, it fell on its side on top of the car, and we had to shove it into the trunk and got soaked in the process. We still had fun though, and even if the fall fucked up my bike, I managed to fix it. I rode my bike to my new internship, which made my already shorten commute a blink. Was I falling in love with a Free Spirit? Quite possibly.
After our first night of what was going to be an affair to remember, I looked down at my Free Spirit from the 6th floor, and said goodnight to Rusty Blu. I woke up the next day to repeat the same gesture of admiration, and looked down to find…nothing.
Rusty Blu!
I ran outside to see that someone had taken my Free Spirit, which I locked to a parking meter. I didn’t know what else to do but call the police, but they could not do anything to bring her back to me. I walked to work late that day, and felt a pain of loss and jealously when others rode pass me with their two wheels. With my lonely, broken heart, I thought, “everyone has a baby but me.”
This city, what else will it take from me?
