went out bike-riding today. i've been doing that a lot lately, ever since i realized that--like jogging--if you just keep going through the ache in your legs and chest, it eventually fades, and you feel like you were born to do this, like this 130-beats-minute, sweat-on-your-face is your body's natural state, and you could go forever--or at least for 20 minutes, until i limp into my driveway, and slobber all over the bottle of water i've left there.

and no matter what i'm wearing, i imagine it's a silky gown flowing out behind me, like priscilla, queen of the damned. it's like i am made of silk and ether, slipping through the atmosphere. hushed. under the radar of the gods--i am camouflaged in the wind, the width of trees or clouds.

and while i'm running or riding, waiting for the seratonin to kick in and make me forget myself, i often think that i wish that were a metaphor for life, that there would be a point it all just feels like flying.

i remember it was suitable a metaphor for culture shock-- that there was a week it all just fell into place--like adjusting the focus on a camera. there was the week it just got easier.

and i thought of jogging.

i did it often. i'd jog through the streets of the village with a stream of 9-year-olds behind me, perfectly imitating me, their arms folded at their sides at 90 degree angles, their legs moving in slow-motion, at exactly the same rhythm as me, their posture perfect, trying not to laugh.

so maybe, i think, life is just a matter of getting used to the culture of life on earth--language, for instance, or the way the wind feels, or the hard fact of time that holds us in, like gravity, pushing against our skin. maybe it's just a matter of adjusting, and there will be a moment it is easy, all of a sudden.

i've heard of freudian ideas that birth is traumatic, and we're all still recovering from that moment we crawled into the world of bright lights and lenolium, orifices covered with hospital gowns. and we're all still reeling from the shock of that, suffering from post-traumatic stress from a cause we can't remember. i like that theory because it makes my sadness universal, my inexplicable emptiness a a part of life on earth, like a chemical deficiency in the air itself, the way we are hold our heads up to the blinding sun.

and it also leaves room for progress, for recovery. for a moment someday when i will ease into the ether, just a woman on a bicycle in a silk skirt, forgetting she even exists.