Edema Rue

A beautiful place with no rhyme or reason. No patterns. All the train tracks that branch off into endless possibilities. Doesn’t matter what ticket you bought; you’re not getting to your destination. And if you do end up getting there, it won’t be how you wanted it to be. It will become a place where everything is unpredictable. A place where, even if you’ve walked that same path before, you can never be quite certain it will take you to the same place. A place with an inconceivable amount of rabbit holes that you could fall into at any point in time. A place where anything and everything can lead you back to the beginning. A place that you could go, and never come back from.

…

…

This has been a description of a platypus’ brain.

How do you do?

Mountain biking: the last thing keeping my mental (and physical lol) health alive. 

That is all.

You’re flying, soaring even as your tires are firmly on the ground. You speed down the burms, not caring that you and your bike are nearly horizontal. You hear the sound of tread on gravel behind you, and you pedal faster, shifting until the sound fades away, unable to keep up with your wings. Dust is thrown up behind you, a billowing cloud to show where you are. You breathe the dust until it seems that you’re breathing more dust then air. One last hill. One last grind. Around this corner, around this switchback…and there it is. A finish line. You’re flying faster now, unstoppable until you cross that line, until you hear the crowd cheering. 

These are my biking glasses: (well sort of, mine are a slightly different color)

And here are the top 10 things about them, in no particular order:

10. They’re very shiny.

9. They let me see the kid on the side of the trail with a broken bike, the kid who’s crying because he would have had a podium win if he hadn’t broken his chain and been stuck alone. They let me see well enough to fix the bike and send him on his way. 

8. The color!! That isn’t the exact color, but it’s pretty close. It’s a cool color.

7. No one can see how sweaty I am.

6. No one can see when I start to cry.

5. They fit like a perfectly tailored masquerade mask, designed to hide my face so that I blend into a crowd of indistinguishable dancers, each hidden from the world by their own costumes and masks. 

4. When you race, there’s a flow. Everyone has a place in it; from the fastest varsity riders to the slowest newcomers. From the crowds cheering at the finish to the lonely soul having technical difficulties on top of the mountain. Even those who’ve crashed and are in the ambulance, covered in blood.!You can feel the flow, the rhythm, the pulse of the race. You feel it when you’re tire to tire going up a hill and when you’re breathing in the dust and flying down. But, you see, I’ve lied to you. Because not everyone has a place in the flow. Some people simply don’t fit. The one walking down the trail because their chain fell off and they just don’t know how to fix it. The one who has to get off at every hill because they just aren’t strong enough, and, to be frank, they just don’t care anymore. The one who can’t go fast enough on the downhills and has to stop every time they hear tread on rocks behind them. The one who got lost, who isn’t even on the right trail anymore. The one who stopped to make a snow angel.

I like my glasses because when I wear them, I can pretend to be a part of the flow.

3. They stop dust from getting in my eyes.

2. They change the way the world looks; there are several lenses, and through each of them, the world becomes something new and beautiful, something novel and exciting. There are lenses that make everything brighter, lenses that darken everything, lenses that make everything blue or yellow or green. Each lens is a reminder of the way emotions can likewise change the way we see the world; after all, a world viewed through a lens of anger is completely different than the world we see through a lens of depression. But the lenses in my glasses are simple, a friendly pretense that any strong emotion could change so easily

1. They match my gloves.