The Ride Home
I step into the skinsuit â one piece, unbroken from ankle to throat â and pull it up over bare skin. That first contact: cool, then immediately warming, a tight Lycra layer that at first sits like a second skin, but then quickly dissolves into something more intimate. Something that knows me. I smooth it upward over my chest, my shoulders, zip it to the throat. The fabric grips everything at once â ribs, spine, the back of my neck â and I feel myself settle into it like an exhale I have been holding all day.
I sit on the bench and let my feet glide into my cycling shoes. Clip the buckles and tighten the Velcro straps with familiar sounds, that suddenly feel final to me. I feel the carbon soles lock my feet into something precise and purposeful.
Already I feel like I am leaving more than just my daily routines behind, as if something truer is beginning.
Outside, the evening air hits the Lycra and I feel it everywhere at once â a full-body awareness, every surface of me present and alive. I pick up my carbon road bike from the rack. I clip in. Push off.
The first kilometers are familiar â traffic, lights, the weight of the day dissolving with each pedal stroke. But then the road opens. And something shifts.
It starts at my feet.
Not pain. Not discomfort. Something slower, deeper â a warmth building from the carbon soles upward, as if the shoes are tightening with each stroke, drawing my feet into them, welcoming them. I glance down. Nothing has changed visibly. And yet the boundary between shoe and foot feels less certain than it did a moment ago. Less necessary. I find I don't miss it.
I push harder. The skinsuit responds â stretching across my thighs, compressing my chest with each breath, gripping my shoulders as I lean into the handlebar. It has always felt like this. And yet tonight it feels like more.
Like it is listening. Like it has been waiting for me. Like it is welcoming me.
I feel a desire to pull the zipper up, to close the suit even more â although I perfectly well know that it is already pulled up tight and hugging me like a lover.
Still, I reach for the zipper at my throat.
There is no zipper. Just Lycra â smooth, unbroken, as if it was always meant to be this way. No way back.
A single beat of panic.
And then â before the panic can find its voice â something else arrives. Larger. Warmer. Irresistible. It moves through me like the first kilometer of a long climb: effort becoming rhythm becoming something close to joy. My breath deepens. My hands grip the bar tighter. I let the realization flood through me.
I can't take it off.
The thought lands not as catastrophe but as relief so profound it frightens me more than the panic did. And then even the fright dissolves â replaced by a warmth that spreads outward from my chest, my belly, down into my thighs, my calves, my feet. I want this. Every cell of me wants this. The wanting is so complete it feels like arriving. Like recognition. Like coming home to something I have always known was waiting for me.
The Lycra continues its work quietly, methodically, lovingly. The seams at my wrists dissolve into skin. At my ankles, the fabric meets the plastic, the leather, the carbon of my shoes and enters them â flowing into the shoes, into the soles, fusing foot to shoe in one seamless surface. My feet are no longer in the shoes. My feet are the shoes. Plastic, leather, carbon and bone finding each other, recognizing each other. I feel the pedals of my bike through the carbon soles of my feet and the road directly â every grain of asphalt, every crack, every slight camber of the tarmac transmitted without translation. I feel more than I have ever felt. I feel everything.
My gloves follow â fingers merging, palms flattening into something purposeful and smooth against the bar tape. I grip the handlebar and cannot tell where I end and it begins. I don't want to know. The not-knowing feels like freedom.
Then the saddle.
I feel it first as pressure â familiar, intimate â and then as something more. The carbon seatpost rises through the Lycra at my lower back, finding the base of my spine, connecting. Not violently. Gently. Inevitably. A warmth deeper than anything before floods upward through my vertebrae, one by one, as the carbon of the frame and the carbon of my transforming bones recognize each other and begin to become the same thing. I feel it spreading â through my pelvis, my ribcage, my sternum â a slow, total transformation, my skeleton rewriting itself into something lighter and stronger and faster. I don't resist. I breathe into it. The frame is not beneath me. The frame is me. Its geometry is my geometry. Its tension is my tension. And I love it â deeply, completely, the way you love something you have been waiting for your whole life without knowing its name.
Then the second wave arrives.
It begins where the Lycra touches my skin most directly â the inside of my thighs, the flat of my stomach, the back of my neck. A new warmth, different from the first. More intimate. The fabric is no longer moving against my skin. It is moving into it.
I watch my forearm. The textile weave of the Lycra â those familiar small diamonds of compression fabric â begins to soften. To simplify. The texture smooths itself out, millimeter by millimeter, the fabric losing its structure as it finds mine. Not disappearing. Transforming. Where there was woven Lycra there is now something denser, sleeker, continuous. My skin is still my skin â but it is no longer covered by this tight layer of Lycra. The Lycra and my skin have been joined in the transformation. It has taken on the weight and surface of black, glossy neoprene. Smooth. Impermeable. Defined.
I run my fingers across my forearm and feel the slight give of the new surface, the density of it, the way it holds warmth and presses back against my touch. This sensation alone fills me with a pleasure so complete I have to steady myself against the handlebar. The logos and paneling of the skinsuit remain â now not printed on fabric but formed into the surface of me, like markings on something built rather than dressed. I am not wearing this. This is what I am made of now. And I feel more myself than I have ever felt.
The third wave begins at the helmet.
I feel it first as a settling â the shell pressing closer, the fit becoming less mechanical and more organic, more mine. The padding dissolves into the curve of my skull. The vents on the top of my head seal themselves, smoothly, one by one. My bicycle glasses extend, they connect to the helmet, turning into a visor that quickly darkens, and then fuses to the jawline, then to my cheeks, my temples, while the helmet grows along the ridge of the visor, enclosing my chin, and moving down the back of my neck until all of my head is encapsulated in a road-bike version of a motorbike helmet. No gaps. No edges. No outside reaching in. The sensation of the extending helmet quickly turns into an overwhelming experience as I feel how this sleek full face bicycle helmet completely fuses with my head, how the shell joins my skull, and my head becomes a helmet, and my vision suddenly is crisper and clearer than ever before as the black visor is becoming my new eyes.
I am enclosed. Completely. Finally.
And the feeling that moves through me in this moment is not fear. It is not even relief. It is something quieter and deeper than both â a stillness at the center of everything, the stillness of a person who has stopped pretending and started being. I have been heading here my whole life. Through every secret, every hidden thing, every moment of wanting without naming. All of it was this. All of it was the road to this moment.
The wheels turn â and I feel them as my feet extended, my reach made circular, my rhythm made continuous and infinite.
I feel the asphalt. Not through the bike. As the bike.
The frame's vibration is my heartbeat. The wheels are my legs. The tires are my grip on the world â warm, humming, alive with contact. The neoprene surface that is my skin gleams in the evening light. The carbon that is my skeleton sings with tension and speed. There is no boundary left to find.
Somewhere behind me, the city continues without me.
Ahead: movement. Sensation. Evening light on warm asphalt. The long road and the body that has become it.
I push down on the pedals.













