I name the bike Marfa. She is a red, slightly used racing model and Jack insists I need to have her. At $80 she is one of the cheaper bikes he’s been able to find in my size while perusing Craigslist’s bikes and bike parts pages. A lifelong appreciation of cycling has turned into an expertise bordering on obsession for him during lockdown, and when I tell Jack I’m considering buying my own bike to get out more, to join him when he rides out to the park or explore a set of side streets in our neighborhood, he becomes fixated on finding me the right one. For Jack, the ideal bike is made for the road, vintage, previously worthy of the Tour de France. He believes a bike isn’t something a person gets for a season, but for long-term use; that if a bike has been made to speed for over twenty days without incident, it should be able to take you to the end of your life. 

On afternoons when he is away working for the library of the university he attends, Jack sends me texts containing pictures of the bikes he’s discovered on his breaks. The search for my perfect ride is difficult. I’m 4’11½”, so finding a 24” bike won’t be the easiest task. Even if Jack manages to locate this unicorn on wheels, it will most likely be in pretty rough shape with dented rims, blown tires, and other things he will have to repair. Locating a bike and making it street safe will be expensive, but even when he says this it isn’t like Jack is complaining. On top of adoring bikes, he has also found a real love in enhancing them. He often returns from work with three packages of parts under his arms, pulls his two bikes into the living room, and spreads his tools on the floor. When he does this, I see an expression cross his face that I’ve only witnessed in children immersed in a treasured hobby, completely devoid of responsibilities and worries. We both know working on bikes means happiness for him, a reprieve from writing his dissertation while holding down a fulltime job in the midst of a global pandemic, so it is an unspoken agreement between us that this enjoyment should always be allowed to him. 

During the weeks that Jack searches for my bike, he comes up with a lot of close, but not quite options. One particularly memorable choice is a hulk of scratched, banana-yellow metal that he sees in an antique shop window and encourages me to climb up on, only to watch me nearly keel over because the thing is actually several inches too tall. When finding a bike seems especially hopeless, my impatience ignites and I sometimes tell Jack to just give up, that I have set my sights on a mint green Huffy cruiser that we can pick up ready to ride at our local Walmart. Each time he refuses to allow me to place the order. “Just give it a little more time,” he says. “You buy the Huffy now and it’ll be defunct in a year. There’s no way you can get parts for it.” At Jack’s insistence that I hold out, I sigh and give a long “Alriiiiiight,” as if I have considered his suggestion and, though I’m not thrilled about it, am only agreeing to it because I care about him. In truth, the way Jack searches for and calls in leads for bikes makes me feel like he really loves me—a feeling that after a year and a half spent together should be unquestionable, but that I often doubt when he describes certain future plans, like buying a house, and I do not appear in these dreams. 

Though Jack and I have survived several potentially relationship-shifting experiences—divorce, court cases, unruly exes, moving in, the onset of a deadly pandemic—finding a bike is the first thing he has ever done solely with me in mind and I love how it brings us together. Dinners are spent hearing about his fascination with biking, its therapeutic qualities, his dislike of inconsiderate cyclists who insist on riding on sidewalks, the never fully healed wound a thief left when they stole the blue racing bike his father gave him which he loved more than any other possession. During these conversations, the topic eventually veers into intense, personal territory, because my reason for wanting a bike and Jack to find it isn’t just that I am bored or looking to invest in my partner’s hobby, but that I am going to need something other than a car to get from point A to point B soon—I’m moving, on my own, to Chicago. 

The acceptance to the Creative Writing PhD program reaches my inbox toward the end of January. Though we are both happy that I’ve been given the chance to continue my studies and writing, I see something in Jack’s eyes drift, dim, then shutter. “You’ll come too!” I say, in a tone that is part question, part determination—the pandemic has not reached us yet and I still believe I have the right to demand things of my future. I make requests of the unfathomable months ahead like a spoiled toddler who thinks she can move the world with the stamp of her foot. I allow myself to continue imagining that some all-knowing, ultimately benevolent if not fearsome power exists just beyond the universe’s atmosphere, that it listens to our desires and works to fulfill them. In short, I am a young, deluded woman who has never lost anything and considers herself so special that she’ll still be able to become a complete person and not have to. I think things will work out, and not just somehow, but exactly as I want. 

When I announce to Jack that he will come with me to Chicago, he looks down and tells me we will talk about it later. The news of my eventual departure has come just as we are about to leave for dinner with friends and he says we are going to be late. In the restaurant—a dimly lit and crowded 1920s speakeasy joint, where Jack and I had our second date and I realized I was going to love him as Louis Armstrong’s “A Kiss to Build a Dream On” played from loudspeakers—I make a comment about liking the hazy exposed Edison bulbs that hang from the ceiling and Jack leans into my ear and whispers, “Could look good in an apartment in Chicago” before giving me a small, tender smile. When we do talk about the move, Jack tells me he can’t leave his job at the library just yet. Traveling to a new city, an expensive one at that, with no surefire employment prospects and an uncertain financial future terrifies him. He’s worked hard to get the job he has, and to give his notice in several months would be unthinkable for him. 

I am completely understanding—self-effacingly so. I explain to Jack that I would never expect him to leave his job right away and come with me to a place where he knows no one and won’t be able to do the work that, though tiring, I know he finds important. Such an arrangement is bound to lead to resentment, and the thought of seeing Jack unhappy makes me forget that I too will be traveling to a city by myself in which I only know one person and will live on a considerably lower salary than the bi-weekly payments I am used to receiving from the elementary school job I have. I am understanding because I have made the unavoidable error of equating Jack’s contentment with my own. So what if we go months with only video calls, texts, no sex, and largely separate lives? Jack and I love each other and people who are in love make difficult things work.  

We come to an agreement that we will do long-distance; that after a year Jack will find another library job in Chicago. “I just need time to figure this all out,” he says. I believe him, and we leave it at that. 

+

Though I thought I had found the perfect way to mastermind a deeper connection with Jack before leaving for Chicago, I will later realize that I couldn’t have chosen a more ironic method. When I watch Jack check listings for bikes, in my head I am all Harry Dacre’s “Daisy Bell,” acting like he is buying us a tandem—the proverbial “bicycle built for two.” In an online blog teaching couples to ride tandem bikes, I learn about the roles of stoker and captain—the person pedaling away, committed to feeding the speed (the life) of the ride, and the person controlling the journey of the whole thing; where it goes and, most importantly, when it stops. Even without the tandem bike, I can see how Jack and I fit into these roles—but then again, I can also just as easily notice how we don’t. Obviously, Jack is not trying to find us a tandem bike that requires our collective cooperation and compromise—as the blog would call it—to make it work. He is trying to find me my own bike which I will be responsible for journeying on all by myself. 

Two-wheeler bikes historically have nothing to do with love or commitment, but rather with personal liberation and social mobility. In the late-1800s, women start learning to navigate the thick rubber tires of children’s bikes before making claim to the slender, sporty ones driven by their male contemporaries. Before this, women are given two options, either submit to a male chaperone leading you god-knows-where on a tandem or stay home. A woman walking alone is considered indecent, but a woman attempting to explore her community while straddling a bumpy, potentially clit-stimulating contraption is completely unheard of. Still, forward-thinking women climb on and get riding. Without male chaperones. Without the demand to tell anyone where they are going. They can see whatever and whomever they want. They can venture out for a seemingly innocuous ride to actually meet up with a lover and have mind-blowing sex. They can even leave that lover of their own volition afterwards once they’ve lined up and refastened all their buttons, smoothed the feral nest ecstasy has made of their hair. 

Bicycles carry associations of self-ownership, desire, and freedom for women. They represent the utopian ideal that a woman may ride as far as her legs and energy will allow her without having to ask someone, let alone a man, for permission. Regardless if I am even slightly aware of this history’s applicability to my life, eventually it will become clear. Without knowing it, just as I believe we are falling deeper in love with each other, Jack is in a way giving me my freedom—something I have had no wish to ask him for. 

+

In the summer, Jack and I start fighting and during those fights Chicago comes up a lot. We make plans to move from our sunny, second floor, birdsong filled apartment to the ground floor of what was once my childhood home because our dog Lady has begun having trouble navigating the stairs. When Jack goes to look at the place that will be our new home, he returns complaining about an unfinished and scuffed piece of wood in the threshold between the kitchen and the solarium. When he calls the piece of wood “disgusting,” something inside me worse than snaps—something in me starts to deeply dislike him. 

After barking at each other over Jack’s intended and unintended reasons for using the word disgusting—does he think my parents are unclean? Does he think I am disgusting? Why all the judgment?—he cries out that he is scared that I am going to find somebody else and break up with him when I go to Chicago. The shoot of recently sprouted anger and annoyance towards Jack is immediately broken off inside me, and suddenly I’m telling him how out of everyone in the world he is the person I would pick to live the rest of my life with, that even if some of our relationship in that life is experienced virtually I would still without a doubt choose him. Jack looks at me unconvinced, but I am telling the truth. I am sure that my love for Jack is fated and indelible. It is around this time that he finally finds me Marfa. 

+

She isn’t what I’ve had in mind, but she’s red. When I call her Marfa, Jack looks up at me confused and says, “Like the city in Texas?” and I nod quickly rather than go into the real reason. When Jack is at work and I am home alone, I rewatch the discontinued Amazon series I Love Dick which is an adaption of Chris Kraus’ book of the same name and only eight episodes long. The show is set in Marfa, Texas—a dusty, DIY kind of community pulled straight from a spaghetti Western—and the cast is headed by Kathryn Hahn as Chris. Marfa the bike, her well-loved condition, her bullet tube shade of 1950s fetish red reminds me of Chris’ wild-haired, shaggy-banged, horny, feminist miscreant character in the show—a persona I simultaneously find attractive and terrifying because Chris seems committed to ruining her marriage, her reputation, some might even say her life, all so she can be her own kind of artist, her own kind of woman. At times, her journey into creative independence can seem almost aspirational, and yet I am unsure of how much of her I want to welcome into my life.

Jack tells me Marfa is located in Lenox, Pennsylvania—a whole state over but really only a 38-minute drive away. I contact the seller who introduces himself as Rocky and set up an appointment for Jack and me to come pick up Marfa that Tuesday. 

+

The day I meet her, Marfa almost kills me. 

Rocky is a middle-aged Black man whose eyes twinkle in the late June sunlight and who looks at Jack and me like he believes we’re really in love, like we’re going to make it. I give him just a little above his asking price—something he adamantly refuses to accept—and when he goes into his house to get change, Jack asks me if I want to try riding Marfa. I swing my left leg over her and settle comfortably. I push off from the ground and suddenly Marfa and I are rushing away from Jack and his Subaru. I try to gain control of her but my feet only succeed in pushing the pedals, making her race down the sidewalk faster. As I pass vacant side streets and driveways, I realize that my hands are too small or stiff from fear to clasp the handle breaks. Marfa has gone berserk and the only way I can stop her is to get her to crash. 

+

A month after Jack and I drive away from Rocky with Marfa in the back of the car, I come to a similar realization about my own life. One morning, I wake up feeling terrible—not ill like I’ve caught a bug, but like I’ve entered a scene in a play too late and become hopelessly disconnected from everything around me. My mind jolts and trips. I try to clear it, but my imaginings are interrupted like a movie someone has inserted random film frames into as a sick joke. I try to explain this to Jack, but don’t do a very good job. He is rushing to get to work and impatiently tells me to “just rest” before walking out the door without giving me a kiss. When he’s gone, I strive to accept that the people you count on to love you are also the ones who are most likely to overlook or misunderstand your need. In that moment I see myself doing the impossible: acting as both captain and stoker of my life, this relationship, forever. I decide I am done riding. 

Panic makes the world take on an alarmingly rapid pace and when it finally stops moving, I realize I have ended up somewhere very bad. Jack, despite his attempts, never really understands why I begin to feel this way and starts to act like the symptoms of the mental illness I will eventually be diagnosed with are things I can just turn off. While I struggle to bring my mind to stasis, Jack spends hours perfecting Marfa instead of making sure I eat and stop using alcohol to sleep through the night. We make the move we planned at the beginning of the summer, and by September Jack is gone. By February, he stops talking to me altogether. 

Marfa remains parked just beyond the allegedly “disgusting” threshold of our solarium. Though her tires are new, she is—or maybe I am—not yet ready for the road. Her front wheel and handlebars are turned as if she is staring at me. She represents a double grief: a freedom not wanted but also never fully explored. 

+

Whenever someone writes or says “looking back,” it reads to me like a cheat code for perspective or, worse, an afterthought. It’s as if the past is something they’ve only just noticed, as if this stretch of time wasn’t once life, too. Lately, all I can do is look back, back to a phase when I was most living, when I was important enough to someone that they took the time to find me a bike. Most of my days are spent remembering, and whenever I do I work to be honest so that maybe I’ll finally grow tired of it all, the same stories, the same looks flashing in the theatre of my skull.

In one of these scenes, I recall my first and only ride with Marfa, the large blue house surrounded by a tall metal fence and orange daylilies that we are careening toward. I aim Marfa at the fence, prepare my body to be thrown from the bike and smashed into it. 

There is a hollow clang and then we stop as cleanly as if we had never moved. I look: Marfa’s front wheel has pushed through the bars of the fence, turned, and then locked itself behind them, linking the rest of her front to the barrier. 

My hands have smacked into the fence, but nothing is broken. Nothing is even cut or bloodied. I let the breath out of my burning lungs—I’m alright. 

From far behind me I hear Jack yelling “Are you okay?!” I turn and give him a thumbs up. A smile stretches across my face, but it feels tight and spreads slow like trying to pull on clothes over wet skin. I start to laugh, my fear coming out the only way it knows how. Jack stares at me, the bike; his stunned expression asks what I’ve done. I keep my eyes on him as I dislodge Marfa, unaware of how soon I’ll have to get used to this—Jack with an accusatory look on his face, perpetually affixed to the distance of my life.