I woke at five in the morning. My roommates were still asleep, and there was nobody to talk with about my night or even hint that something possibly wonderful had happened with the girl I’d been telling them about. I bobbed about my bedroom, standing up and sitting down, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I went out for a bike ride, bristling with a wild energy that had only increased overnight and needed to vent or transform itself into some new form or rhythm.
I pedaled from our Venice apartment and down to the ocean, then around the Marina del Rey inlet, through the clustered parking areas and the whirlwinds of morning trash, past the long skinny sheds that house the crew boats, over the pedestrian bridge, past the empty volleyball nets, past the grittily steadfast early morning joggers who would never understand my joy.
I biked through the seaweed breeze coming off the sand and through the ocean’s morning smells, past more scattered beachfront litter and then on towards LAX and then past it, then past the empty boardwalks and the houses level with the beach, and then the gulls and the waves and the early surfers parking their cars and heading out casually towards the ocean with their short boards tucked beneath their arms. Maybe the surfers might have understood a little.
Every now and again I stopped and took off my helmet and my bike gloves and looked around to see if staring at my surroundings or the ocean birds or the waves or the rising sun would release what was in my heart, but it would not. It was still too big. I had not gone far enough.
And breathing the ocean air would not release it either, and no matter how hard I pedaled, neither the little gears nor the big gears or any arrangement of gears in between would release it, but still I pedaled on, further and harder, until I was exhausted. I checked my watch repeatedly to decide when it was too early to call her without looking desperate or foolish.
But the idea of speaking to her again, of confirming everything, became a temptation I could not resist, and somewhere in Redondo Beach I succumbed and called her from a bike path phone booth. I left a rambling message about surfers and birds and waves and ocean air and the joys of bike riding first thing in the morning.
Later when Melanie and her mother returned from breakfast on Melrose, they listened to my message on the kitchen counter answering machine. The mother looked over at her daughter and said, “that sounds like a man who has fallen in love.”
Reposted from the Maple Drive essays about how I met my wife.
I loved reading this again. Still sweet and real and alive.
Beautiful.