On your left

This year — my senior year — I’m living off-campus. It was about damn time. I enjoyed dorm life, don’t get me wrong, but there’s only so many communal showers, air condition-less nights and flying rodents a man can handle before he snaps and signs a lease.

I’ve always thought of myself as independent, so the off-campus lifestyle is suiting me well. But living on your own — properly on your own — for the first time presents its own challenges. I got a taste of them studying abroad, but still: How do you cook meals without using a microwave? How do you budget your money like a well-adjusted adult and not an iPad kid? 

And how am I getting to campus?

Well, for one, I have a car. There’s my own two feet, as well. But an enticing compromise between the speed of driving and the calmness of walking is a bike.

I’ve always loved riding bikes, but I’m not a cyclist. Biking has never been a sport for me, in part because no sport has been a sport for me. I’ve never been the biker who wears neon spandex; I’ve never been the one who wears a matching, flashing helmet. I’ve never been the biker peddling like a circus clown straight down the middle of the street instead of on the sidewalk like a decent human being while you’re stuck trailing them in your car cursing Karl Drais for ever having invented the bicycle — Sch*eße! — in the first place.

For me, riding bikes is nostalgic. It reminds me of a time when my bike was my only method of transport — when it served as my passport to adventures with friends, like the kids in “Stranger Things” or “It.” We would ride them to a park, to one another, across the train tracks. I would ride mine down the hill where my house sat at the bottom; I’d spin endlessly in circles in the cul de sac on my street. I’d skin my knees.

Since I bought a bike this summer, riding it has been my chance to reflect. I’ve lived my whole life beside the Illinois Prairie Path, a 61-mile stretch of former railroad track, now bike trail, west of Chicago. It takes you through forests and fields, over bridges and streams, past nature preserves and small pastures of farmland. Working a nine-to-five internship mostly remote, biking the Prairie Path this summer was the time I spent alone with my thoughts — an hour, maybe two, of silence. 

Lately, my thoughts drift toward senior year. They say college goes by fast, but when your four years are bookended by two viral pathogens, it doesn’t feel like time is moving quickly, but like time has passed you by. I’ve had a positive college experience, but how different has it been because of COVID? What have I gained? What have I lost? It’s hard to mourn what you don’t even know.

So I don’t think about that too much. I think a bit about what happens when I graduate — the blank, open canvas of my life — but it’s a canvas so empty and white it hurts to look at. What happens when I get off the 17-year conveyor belt of American education? Will it be like when you stumble off the moving walkway at an airport? I’m not very coordinated.

When family members ask me if I’m excited for senior year, I tell them it will be busy, but good. I’m always busy. I think I like being busy. But I don’t want to peddle so fast that everything passes by in a blur. Biking has never been a sport for me.

Instead, I want to feel a gentle breeze in my hair. I want to feel soft sunlight on my arms, on my hands. I want to skin my knees. I want to keep on riding.