An Ode to the Bicycles I May Never Ride Again
By Robyn Yzelman
I have been brought to many places by bicycle. As much as the journeys were powered by physical effort, it is by some grace that I largely forget the difficult parts: how I sweated and huffed up countless hills, gritting through fatigue in my legs. Cycling has retained a purely magical quality in my mind, that I have been carried from the waist up, gliding through air, time, and space, my eyes free to wander the things I love: the wilderness, an open road.
I have been that breathless pedaler, racing across a city to meet a lover. By the Pacific Ocean in Chile following migratory birds in parallel, craning my neck to see the terns from the gulls. Jamming the brakes mid-climb up a desert valley to watch a flock of parakeets painted golden in the sunset next to me -- my five-second meeting with the divine. I have never known such freedom and power as on a bicycle, its two wheels a rolling infinity loop. On a bicycle I could go on forever, if I only dared.
After years of constant movement, I finally returned home to Singapore. I was uprooted into stillness, strangely bereft after selling my last bike. I hungered for the speed and the wind. I missed the intimacy of riding a bicycle, the act of making something else an extension of my body, made whole into the sum of many moving parts. Each time I glimpsed a cyclist on the road I felt the visceral urge to kiss someone or be kissed. To be swept off my feet, grounded yet hurtling through the earth, all senses awakened.
So I bought a new bike, my first ever thousand-dollar purchase. For those first months I assembled the portions of a life I wanted: a job I liked then, rock climbing with friends, cycling to the gym and the beach, teaching yoga on Sunday mornings. I had just climbed outdoors for the first time, on the back of caves where worshippers thronged a golden shrine. Unlike the gym where every route is plotted out with color-coded holds, I had to find my own way up the ancient, jagged pieces of limestone. I ascended slowly, half-paralyzed by terror on what was supposed to be the wall’s easiest route. My body was still shaking when I got down but I could not wait to do it all over again. I was the strongest I had ever been, on the cusp of something new. There was nothing to suggest that it would end with anything other than the same triumph that I felt every time I hauled myself up a piece of rock.
It turned out to be one of the last times I would ever climb. While halfway up an indoor wall two weeks later, I had the sudden realization that although my eyes could see my chalked, sweaty fingers gripping the plastic holds, I could neither feel them nor my body’s connection to my hands. These were the beginning signs of small fiber neuropathy, not so much a diagnosis as a fancy way of saying that the tiny, unmyelinated nerves throughout my body responsible for transmitting sensation and controlling blood pressure, temperature, sweat, and myriad other functions were damaged for reasons unknown, causing severe pain. Although I am learning to compartmentalize and ignore the pain, it grows and gnaws unabated. It is there when I walk down the street, open a door, hold my phone, and even as I am typing this: every microscopic nerve fiber making its presence -- or rather, its dying -- known. I picture my nerves withering like a blight spreading across a field of grass, and nobody knows why or what to do.
I sold my climbing gear and gave up teaching yoga. For the past year I have not been able to run or do a downward dog -- simple and pleasurable ways of moving that most able-bodied people take for granted. In my grief I have tried to see this as an offering, perhaps in the hope that it might yield a reprieve in some kind of nonexistent cause and effect, a way for me to muster up some strained acceptance. I could not let go of my bicycle though. I spent an imprudent amount of money attempting to treat my pain, trying different things: bike fits, different pedals, gloves, shoes, a trainer. I counted the days I would venture out for a ride, high on short-lived endorphins, and the weeks after with my hands burning in pain.
Cycling remained an important solace for me. As most of the world retreated inside their four walls to quarantine, I looked longingly out of the window and back to the bicycle gathering dust in my room, deciding that it did not matter anymore whether I could trust my hands to brake. So I pedaled onto empty highways and boarded a boat for a small island offshore. I watched the deep blue waters, hypnotized by the rhythmic lapping of waves. I became a giant encroaching upon an idyllic Eden, the unswept leaves and fruit crunching loudly under my wheel, sending invisible birds fluttering deeper into the shaded mangroves. Then came another week when I was too afraid to ride, waiting in limbo for medical tests to determine if I had a structural defect in my heart: my Schrodinger’s heart, beating steadily unseen but maybe beating the wrong way, alive but maybe not. After my neurologist finally called with the results, the first thing I did was take my bicycle to the beach to ride along the sea in celebration. At night I dreamt of gripping my bike fitter by the collar, pleading for a solution, for something.
During those weeks I would report the increased pain in my hands to my acupuncturist with feigned nonchalance, as though I was unaware of the cause. I could not understand failing to ride a bicycle, something so seemingly simple and integral to who I was. At the same time, how could I keep doing it in so much pain? The shame was double-edged and impossible. I had already given up everything else that made me happy -- was I not allowed to keep just this one thing?
According to legend, in 1299 the Hindu prince Sang Nila Utama set sail from Sumatra in hopes of reaching an island he had glimpsed from afar, only for his ship to meet a treacherous storm halfway through the voyage. Rocked by the mighty waves a hair’s breadth away from capsizing, the sailors heave all their possessions into the sea to lighten the ship. Only Sang Nila Utama’s jeweled crown is left. Begging the sea for mercy, he throws it overboard as a final offering. Miraculously, the waves calm and his ship is saved. They see the white shores of their new kingdom when the light of dawn arrives, and on the island he encounters a mystical lion he has never seen before, with a black head and red body. He names his kingdom after it: Singapura, or Singapore.
I don’t remember exactly where I first heard the legend. Maybe it was from my childhood, or later on as a myth appropriated for social studies class, the first of many important men (obviously, always men) to stand at the head of kingdom and nation, percolating in my consciousness over the years. I have thought endlessly about the moment on the ship when he throws his crown -- everything that he was and had -- into the sea, succeeding where I have failed to strike a bargain with the universe. Did he cry when he gave up his crown? In what ways was he transformed? Could I get a kingdom in exchange for a bicycle?
In preparation for yet another cross-continental move, I recently spent half a Saturday looking at bicycles, picturing myself gliding on their elegant lines of steel along miles and miles of open road and trails. Then for the rest of the day I cried uncontrollably at how my hands felt especially ablaze in pain from a ride two days before: a dream that was supposed to be about strength and triumph reduced to a fantasy I may not be able to live out. I feel I am Sang Nila Utama in a reckoning on that sinking ship, bargaining the past and present for the future ahead. Perhaps it is time that I surrender the last vestiges of an old, ill-fitting identity. In grieving and starting anew, his story is an anchor: when you have cast overboard everything that you thought you were, who will you be? What will you find?
Robyn Yzelman is a Singapore-born, St. Louis-based writer and anthropologist working in the Bolivian Amazon.
