Mind the Gap

Today I rode my bike, and I thought about life like skipping stones.

I am 19. Nine-teen. I rode my bike with my little sister not to keep her company as an aunt would a niece, but as a sibling would a sibling when they live with their parents and want to enjoy a cerulean blue sky.

I am not yet 20, but even if I were, it should mean nothing to me. I’m not in a hurry to prove anything. I rode my bike today under singsong sun and the breaths of childhood winter; I sought nothing but silvery tunes and the crunches of leaf under-tire. It’s not that I’m not ready to give up what is good and known, but that there is no need. The world continues to wink for me though I’m a junior in college, so I pedal and fill my lungs with mossy green air. Today, I am still a teen.

I turn twenty in seven days, and I recently “talked” to a boy who turns twenty-four in four months minus one day. For him, I thought about what comes next. I thought about life like skipping stones and figured I could depart at the next hop because his eyes shone confidentially blue. I could have forgone my final few years of sunlit ripples for a dip in the deeper end. But I soon found that I still dream of being a child again, rather than having my own.

There is a line in the sand somewhere, and as of today, it is decidedly uncrossed.

My sister and I rode our bikes for an unaccounted-for number of hours and nearing the end, we spied an unfamiliar playground at the corner of a familiar street. I told her I feared it might mysteriously disappear before we came back to look tomorrow. So we circled around for the Hidden Playground though wind-parched and sore. The boy of twenty-four may have looked with his nephew’s play-places in mind, but I looked because that playground shared with me a wonderfully simultaneous reality, and what if it weren’t meant for another? I looked for peace of mind. I looked because I have not yet been on this Earth for two decades but that means nothing other than that I still revel in mysteries such as the Hidden Playground. We were not in a hurry to return home. 

Twenty-four is an elastic stretch of space-time away. It has me thinking of rings and promises, childhoods that are not my own, farewells and finality. If I think too long and hard, I feel as though suspended within that tiny gap between stone hops, and there is nothing next save for breath-taking free fall.

Yet were I to turn twenty-four tomorrow, that should be ok. What I mean to say is just that I rode my bike today because I can. I can ride my bike when I’ve not yet been on this Earth for three decades — when I’m supposed to be teaching a smaller soul how to pedal — and I will ride my bike for as long as the roads beam. I thank the boy for his secrets and stark reality, but the sun is still humming its silver star tunes, and like a waltz, the elastic has begun to unstretch. Space-time is not so simple as skipping stones, it would seem — we’ve missed this hop. Maybe there will be another, and maybe not. Outside, the clouds continue their journey, and I will pedal along.

I am nineteen today. I will be twenty soon.

But that line somewhere remains uncrossed, and the sky still shines cerulean blue.