A Perfect Piece of Machinery

 My motorcycle is a perfect piece of machinery. A paradise on a pair of wheels. A sleek vessel meant to transport me through time and space, leaving all the stress, the worries and the less than lively bits of reality blowing away like autumn leaves in my tailwinds. This is my special place, without being a single place at all. A continuously moving point of the world, a dot on the map tracing paths of pavement in swerving lines and curving swells like an ocean. I leave all the billboards and advertisements in the breeze, all of the attempts to take away a part of who I am, what I’ve earned. For this moment, it’s all in the past. 

My motorcycle is where I am free. Steadily churning along the highways and byways, trees and turns sailing on by in equal measure. In this moment, I am not my job title and I am not whatever labels have been stuck to me. I have no past and no future and my present is the gift of the wind. I am an eagle in flight. I am a sailor at sea. I am the greatest thing and I am absolutely nothing at all.

My motorcycle is my amnesia. I can forget the frustrations, the agitations, the upsets and the put downs, the losses and the wins alike. I am peace, in the here and now. I am the very thing I have always wanted to be. Ancient and newborn all at once.

My motorcycle is an extension of my body and we are fully in tune to each other. My diagnostic check is done with sensory perception. I feel the road, I hear it, I smell it. Every bounce and imperfection, the air pressure, the oil. It is all me in a way I never knew until that first time I got to feel it and I still didn’t know it until the miles began to tick on by. It creeps on you, much as the years do, until one day you look down and you don’t know where the bike ends and you begin.

This is perfection. It is peace, it is power, it is calm and it is a thrill.

This is my motorcycle.