bicicletta
-stacey-
She chains her bicycle to itself. She’s aware it won’t prevent somebody from picking it up and walking away with it, but at least it will stop them from using her bicycle as a getaway vehicle for stealing her bicycle. She will not be an accomplice in stealing from herself — a thought she finds pleasing.
Too much of her life has been spent stealing from herself. She went to college and took the courses her parents thought she should take. She met a man and dropped out of college to help him through graduate school. She married the man and on holidays they visited his parents. She went on the pill, though she’d always wanted children. After he first spoke of divorce, she remembered a poem in which a man apologized for eating all the plums in the icebox. Forgive me, the poem concluded, they were delicious. After he was gone, she was angry that he’d eaten the plums — until she recalled she’d never wanted them to begin with.
Now she protects herself. But not too much. She’s bought herself a bicycle the color of an unripe plum, and she chains it to itself. You can steal my bike, she thinks, but don’t expect me to help you do it.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
