present
I've taken lately to thinking about cars not as machines with drivers but as big, dumb dinosaurs. From the way they interact with me- or don't as is more often the case- it's as if I don't enter their radar until I'm right in their way. The oblivious t-rex and singularly minded Spinosaurus (the largest dinosaur EVER, for those of you who don't interact with 6-11 year olds or paleontologists regularly), each on it's own path, chasing the green light and watching out for predators, but not cyclists nor often, pedestrians.
I have been very nearly tramped by these metaphorical beasts a number of times in the past couple of weeks, often on the very road I spoke so highly of as being bliss-inducing just a few posts ago. Yesterday, I narrowly dodged two cars on my way to work and only skimmed past a third as it attempted to fjord the stream of traffic edging towards it. None of these close encounters has been of my making and in each case I was both well lit and fairly visible.
Let's break it down. I'm about a tenth of the size of a master bedroom in a Manhattan apartment, taking up what must amount to about 40 cubic feet when I'm on my bike. Surely I am noticable? When it rains and visibility is lower, I wear so much day-glo that I look like a raver turned CSI investigator. Still, I am turned into, driven through, and pushed aside on a regular basis, treated like a microceratops (the smallest ceratopsian dinosaur, weighing in at 4 or 5 pounds) even though I'm clearly more of a Albertadromeus syntarsus (a speedy herbivore!)
Being constantly in the path of potential Jurassic doom is needless to say, a little fraying. Being visible yet always invisible is fraying. Following the rules and yet facing the threat of extinction, fraying. I am constantly alert, my senses piqued to sense the minutest movement around me. I am ever watching and feel I have to be.
Which makes it all the more paradoxical that my big fall happened free of cars. It had nothing to do with those around me and everything to do with my own obliviousness to my self as a being with agency in the game. To put it simply, I was the girl who didn't know she was there.
I had been riding on cruise control along a particularly cushy stretch of road on my commute home. It was flat with a bike lane and a set of generally benign drivers. My wheel faltered and edged itself into a curb. I edged through the air onto the adjoining sidewalk where I lay splayed, glasses hanging off, dirt clouding around my body, with a newly ripped a hole in my gloves and had skinned elbow through three layers of clothing. I was embarrassed but moreover, I was frightened. After all, I had just re-realized that shit, I do exist!
A week or so ago, I sat in the rain behind a truck and realized that, wait, I was in the rain, behind a truck and I should be pretty miserable. I had thought pleasantly of my ability to zone out so fully that I could be free of my surroundings. I think this is how drug addicts think, though I can't say for sure. What I do know, now especially, is that being blissfully unaware of myself in my surroundings is an ignorance which can only last so long before it comes to a nasty, gritty end.
I caution you out there in reader land to think a bit more about your presence as you move. You may be perfectly able to write your shopping list or think about your vacation while keeping an eye on external danger. Yet the unperceived danger, that of an absent self, is just as treacherous, if not more so, than the errant dinosaur or car- however you describe it. After all, this one predates from the inside out.