Frontier Of Possibility

The Fall

The first time I tried to ride a bike I fell. I crashed straight into the pavement. Through wet eyes I managed to make out small sanguine drops climbing out of a barcode array of tiny gashes that painted my kneecaps and the palms of my hands. As I stared at the painful climbers, tears now congregating in the corners of my eyes preparing for their great odyssey downwards, the malevolent image imprinted against my eyeballs, ingraining itself in my memory.

From then on, the image of those terrific red blobs hounded me. Even the idea of a bicycle made me shrivel up inside myself like a turtle. There was nothing not a thing that anyone could do to get me to try to ride a bike again: I was done with bikes.

And that wasn't really a problem for me, at least for a while. I could get everywhere I needed to go by walking or getting a ride from my parents.

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Occasionally, of course, I pondered the potential of bicycles and considered trying to ride one again, but before I could ever finish a coherent thought about the matter those parasitic crimson particles would overshadow and consume my mind, and, with a shiver and a shake of the head, the idea would be dropped. Because, I mean, sure, my friends all left me in the dust to ride their bikes together off into the distance, and, true, my world was limited to a circle only a couple miles wide, but those were concerns of very little magnitude against the colossal threat of bikes and their lurid companions.

I found myself making sacrifice after sacrifice to avoid learning how to ride a bike, using mediocre-at-best justifications excuses, really to convince myself that I didn't have a problem, that I wasn't being dominated by an oppressive memory from years ago. But one day I got fed up with making excuses. I got fed up with the smallness of my world. I got fed up with the red dots. I took my bike, dusty but otherwise in pristine condition and surprisingly not too small, out onto the driveway. As I grabbed the handlebars I felt my heart wildly throbbing up into my throat, but I gulped it back into place. I took a deep breath and mounted my enemy. Instantly my mind grew cloudy and my vision hazy as the red terrors swarmed my conscience. I trembled and hesitated. I leaned my bike to dismount as my fortitude wavered. But I didn't dismount. With another deep breath and a determined grunt, I readjusted my bike and took off down the driveway, quickly approaching the pavement where I fell years before.

I didn't fall this time. Rather, I traversed the uneven pavement like a natural and flew down the street, going faster and faster, experiencing for the first time the cool wind blasting against me as I blew past the world around me at unprecedented speeds. It was wonderful. I was no longer bound by the ruddy shackles of my fear, no longer confined to the tiny world directly around me, no longer isolated from the adventures of my friends. What was once an impossible sixty minute journey was now a very manageable twenty minute, perfunctory commute. My mind raced with ideas as I ruptured the frontier of possibility: I could bike to school, or the ice cream shop, or the bakery, or the hotdog joint, or the supermarket, or my friend's house, or the park. Going that fast, the haunting red dots couldn't keep up with me anymore, so I left them behind and didn't look back.