Faster
I’ve understood this from the first moment I threw a leg over the back of a motorcycle — you can not understand speed until your full body is exposed to it. And, once you understand it, you are transmuted by it.
On a bike, speed is like sunlight; you’re bathed in it, every cell saturated by it, in a way that warms you to the center of yourself, in a way that tickles open the unfurling green growth at your edges.
Speed moves over you as you swim upstream through a river of air, defining your relationship to the stone and wood and metal and flash of glass that either sits motionless and unobserving as you pass or drifts through the current beside you.
Speed makes you dynamic and meditative, and speed shapes your body to the bike, and here you’re not riding but running — running faster and faster, so fast that your legs have become wheels, and you can stop anytime you want to but you don’t want to because it’s only in this river of speed that you truly feel that you can breathe. From the moment you learn to swim here, this breath is the breath only breath that will truly slake your lungs.
The speed rushes past your helmet and in through the slitted vents in your leathers and through the sweat-damp cotton of your luckiest shirt until it finds your skin with its flicking fingers, wrapping tight around you until you feel your own exquisite nakedness and know that this speed owns you completely; that even when you’re lying perfectly still in the moments before you sleep, you’ll remember how it touched the small of your back when you tucked under the wind, and how it fluttered in your stomach when you went through that corner a touch too hot, and how it filled your sails and buoyed you giddily past the slashing blur of a standstill world.
You should wear earplugs, but you don’t because then you wouldn’t hear her singing to you; you should obey the posted rules, but you don’t because you’re chasing her — chasing a sharp-toothed sweetness you will never catch.
