i donât know how old i was when i first got a bicycle, but i know there were a few teeth missing from the side of my mouth, a gap big enough for me to put my tongue through while i smiled too big down the neighborhoodâs âbig hill.â the bike was blue and shone, wheels white, seat silver. when i bit the rubber of the handlebars, i tasted the salt from the sweat of my palms. this was the same age when my hair was longer and stringy, black and falling down the length of my back. my teeth were crooked, had grown in wrong because i had âtaken them out too late.â the kind of wonky and crooked where i would laugh behind my hand, spend an hour every night pushing them out with my tongue so that they would align like my friends who could afford to get braces. it was the age of my cerulean blue sparkling shirt, made out of a fabric that stretched so i could fit my head and my knees inside of it, stretched so wide that i hid a friend with me in there one night when i was too small. the same age where i would tell the girls i sat with at lunch that the stain on my pants were from the âspaghetti that i had spilled the night before,â and each time, no matter how many times, they would nod, not knowing how convoluted my shame of being was. i am seven or maybe iâm ten and there is gravel between my toes, stuck in my palms, the driveway making little red mosaics along my knees, my calves, my thigh. iâm eating soba noodles with dirty feet and bitten fingernails, and the woman who raised me is pregnant with another child. iâm laying down and watching an ant crawl from my pinkie finger to my shoulder until itâs nine pm and the sun is setting, blushing so loud that the crickets are all hushed up. iâm laying in the grass and thereâs nothing frightening me, because the earth yes. the earth, yes.Â
iâm reading stories about children on my bed now in a dormitory in new york city, thinking about the small girl that i was. the girl with the long hair, the small laugh, the one who would follow everyone around because she was unsure of where she was going. i think of where i am now in comparison, how i have lost so little of my love for touch, for texture, for the earth, but how my placement is so different, how the people i surround myself with have shifted from mothers to friends, from fathers to small, clumsy boys, from crying because momma didnât tuck me in at night to being afraid of phone calls telling me that itâs important i need to come home. Â iâm reading stories about childhoods and iâm thinking about my blue bike, how good it felt when it was my birthday and i sat for the first time in the dusk of september with my mouth tasting like carvel chocolate cake, pedaling faster and faster, moving through the september air for the first time like i was free, regardless of my clipped wings, regardless of how we are not accustomed to flight, as the neighborhood moved ahead and behind me again and again, the yellow forsythias turning into a blur, the petals blurring the edges of the road, the white houses with their warm rooms, my legs burning strong and muscular, Â palms sweating into the white rubber of the handlebars, my tongue in the gap between my teeth. mouth open, beaming.Â
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