Riding a motorcycle is my escape, 3 days face down doing chemo, day 4 fire it up baby time to roll.
There’s a ritual to riding, and it never changes. Helmet in hand, walk up slow, like approaching an animal that remembers every wound you gave it and still lets you climb on its back. Key in, button pressed, and she wakes up with a low rumble that rolls through your ribs. She purrs while I strap on my helmet, pull the gloves tight, kick on the Bluetooth, and hit play, something loud enough to drown out the doubts. Then the last part of the ritual: kickstand up, one down into first, and just like that, the world drops away behind me.
She likes to warm up, growl a little, complain about the cold engine and my impatience. But once she’s ready, once the blood and oil are moving, it’s go time. Riding a motorcycle is simple on paper and lethal in practice. Everyone knows the rule: you will go down. Not might. Not someday. You will. And I’ve kissed asphalt more times than I can count.
The big one was when I was eighteen. San Diego. One wrong move at 130 miles an hour, one bad second, and I woke up in a hospital with 28 broken bones and a jaw wired shut. Spent a month in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering if I’d ever feel alive again. The day I got out, I cut the cast off my arm myself, hopped on my bike, and ripped up the freeway at 150 miles an hour to see my girlfriend in Orange County. Couldn’t talk, but my brain was screaming, still got it, bitches. Stupid, reckless, necessary. Back then, being young meant flipping off anything that smelled like a rule. Jobs, school, politics, money. Fuck all that. I wanted to surf, ride fast, push myself until the world blinked. I wanted the edge, every inch of it.
Now the edge has shifted. Now it wears a lab coat and a grim expression. Cancer doesn’t care about your attitude. It doesn’t blink when you curse at it. It just keeps taking. But I’m not going quietly. If I’m going back to the gods, it won’t be crawling. It’ll be on my feet, or on two wheels doing something stupid with a grin on my face.
Riding has changed for me. It’s not rebellion anymore. It’s a revolution of the soul. When the chemicals burn through my veins and my insides fold in on themselves, Felicia. yes, that’s her damn name gives me something real. Felicia, as in “Bye Felicia,” because if you pull up on me at a light, I will smoke you before you figure out what happened. Proven repeatedly. She isn’t just horsepower. She’s freedom in metal form. She calms the noise in my head, opens something in my chest, reminds me that I’m still here. I’ve almost eaten it on her twice in the last couple months. Didn’t bother me. Not really. There’s something honest about almost dying when everything else feels like slow torture.
That’s the lesson I keep circling back to. When life caves in, when your body mutinies, when the doctors shrug and speak in probabilities, you don’t lay down. You don’t wait to be saved. You fucking fight. You research. You trust your instincts more than some man in a white coat reading a chart. And most of all, you find the thing that makes your heart slam against your ribs and your brain light up like a summer firework. Maybe it’s riding. Maybe it’s something else. But you need something that scares you alive.
Because when everything is falling apart, when the clock is running down, adrenaline is clarity. Danger is prayer. Speed is truth.
Trust me friends. It’s beautiful. Thank you for reading.
Read this on Substack where it first appeared — if you’re into that sort of thing.
