3/28/2021
This morning, I caught up with a group of friends on Zoom. I perched my phone against a coffee container and continually removed and replaced my gloves, only exposing a thumb, in order to interact with the floating heads of my loved ones. The umbrella outside of the cafe was futile against the rain––the speed accelerating with the prescion of a shower attachment. The droplets that escaped the barrier of plastic eventually bounced onto my screen and obscured the faces of my friends shortly before rolling off onto the table––blurring their facial features into magnified RGB pixels. In my physical body, I took up public space. I gestured with the intensity that comes from talking with three friends about passionate topics, but passersby merely witnessed a solitary, masculine-presenting human gesticulating into a handheld device.
Hours later, Joelle sent me an essay in which I felt immense kinship towards. The author, Daniel, penned a letter to the joys of biking at night. To him, “pedaling felt like a celebration of kinetic energy, of blood, cartilage, and bone,” and this act brought him peace as someone who lives with a preexisting heart condition. The pleasure of movement became a way to free the body from the prison that fate constructed around it.
Reading this essay, I thought back to sitting outside during a rainstorm. I thought back to yesterday, sitting in the grass at Brower Park, resting the legs that propelled me over nine miles. I thought back to that same day, even hours earlier, where a conversation with Adriene traversed the speed of hyperobjects. Even as my body currently sits on a couch in my living room, I think about the energy it expels. Harshali, one of my friends whom I gesticulated towards this morning––referred to this idea of our bodies as “living fossils.”
Towards the end of the essay, Daniel referred to the potholes he’d hit on his bike, the “jolts in the road”, and how they reminded him that he “still existed in these streets.” I couldn’t help but reverberate that clause as I imagined my living fossil eventually depleting––the ideas I’ve shared and reverberating actions of my body during my time on Earth being the only renewable resource that outlives me. When my body eventually leaves, we’ll [sic] still be in these streets.