How To Get Rid of Apartment Fever

You will need a bike. Any bike will do. When you wake up, you will open a window in nearly every room in the house, and air freshly loosed from winter’s binding will curl in through the open cracks, and your body, dormant these past five months, will breathe the scent of spring and rally for motion. Bike ride.

Voices will say, “That old Schwinn, bits of cobwebs in the spokes, metallic sky-blue paint scuffed and pitted, the garage-sale buy? The tread on the tires is shaved to a rubber nub, and you will have to drag your feet against the concrete at stop signs because the brakes are more like slow-downs. You will be late to work. You will ruin the shower you just took. You will be hit by a bus riding along the main thoroughfare, the four lanes of tense commuters.”

Ignore them. Tell them this. Tell them you will buy tires and breaks this weekend. Tell them you will have enough time if you stop this too much thinking, and do. Tell them you have just returned home from Ethiopia. Tell them you haven’t seen spring in four years (Addis Ababa has only two seasons.), and you’ve missed it. Tell them showers are for ruining and life is by nature dangerous and this nexus of time and space, this now, this beautiful morning is once in a lifetime and will never be again.

Now, your adrenaline sparks bright in your bones like pistons, because you’ve decided this morning will be an adventure. You will bike to the school three miles away where you teach. Your determination jitters as you sort through stamps and screwdriver tips and chalk in the drawer beside the stove to find the chain-link dog collar you’ve made into a bike-lock, a heft you haven’t felt since winter. Rust then reds your fingers as you grab the air pump your father gave you. You think of him as you twist off the caps and adjust the nozzle and press breath into the worn inner tubes. Your father refurbishes old Schwinns as a hobby and tells you stories of his 6 bike rides to work. You were away so long and will leave again, but are happy now that you can tell him about it this Sunday, Easter.

After breakfast, you adjust your laptop and bag on your back, double check you’ve packed your lunch, your keys, your book. You wheel your bicycle from the spare room, through the living room and the little entryway, out the door. With a determined huff, you heave the bike on your shoulders and walk down the three flights of stairs. Already, the blood jostles in your veins, and you feel strong. You squeeze through the front entrance—and are off. It feels somehow liberating to be carless, to be so in the air that unexpectedly chills your skin, so next to it, breathing it firsthand so to speak. You rejoice in your autonomy from the clumsy accoutrements of this age. Your ability to move forward is found in your own muscles. You feel more in control of motion, more one with motion itself.

Take the side roads as much as you can. Sidewalks are best, even if the cracks jilt. You will be surprised how much you notice from the seat of a bicycle. You are not seeing life fast-whipped or through the veil of windows. There is nothing between you and this day. You notice how the historic brick homes and apartments feel so immediate, almost as if you are trespassing on private property. You notice the puffs of dandelion in the grass, red buds purpling trees, the names of things, like the apartments called “charmed.” You notice a man walking into a school and imagine people inside saying, there goes “Mr. So-and-So,” as he enters his world, that space where, for this day, he belongs.

Further down as the road curves, the homes expand with brick terraces, landscaped gardens, wide porches, picture windows: the homes of the wealthy who breathed a hundred years ago. You wonder how in your car you never saw all this frothing life. The trees petaled in pale green or bending under blossoms. A patch of violets. The warming wind cool over the curves of 7 your face. When the honeysuckle hedges umbrella over the sidewalk and you rush through the leafy tunnel, down slowly, faster, thrilled with the boon of gentle gravity.

You will pass from the side streets back onto the main one, tumultuous with movement, and riding your bike you feel suddenly a part of this pulsed and pulsing city, a sudden and ephemeral belonging. Over the bridge, you pause and watch the water rushing like the traffic in the street. You then curve back to the quiet side streets lined in trees and sidewalks and homes for whom the word “quaint” was coined, trimmed city homes, new houses in the shapes of old ones. You see a lady walking her dog, then another cyclist in a white blouse riding to work, and you feel a sense of camaraderie. We are biking together, enjoying this day. You can smell flowers opening their perfumes quickly fading. Lilac, perhaps, or hyacinth? Memories of spring and crabapple-petal snows and running bare toes over cold mud. You arrive at school, almost surprised it is there. And you rejoice that you tasted this offered joy, this once-in-a-universe spring morning, this gift.

Published in Ginosko Literary Journal | Issue 25