Not quite a late night ride.

After four years of not riding on a motorcycle, we've gotten back into a place where we can (and do) go out together. I don't drive a bike - I'm just a trusting passenger. Marc's been driving for 15 years or so. The new bike is great, the time together is better, and tonight it worth writing about. So here I go.

The ride is so smooth that even at 70 mph I feel like I could just step off the bike. It's kind of a scary feeling, knowing how momentum and gravity would grab a hold of me and shake me like a rag doll, flinging me around in a fit of discipline to my flight of fancy. I used to feel like I could just fling out my arms and the wind would take me. Somewhere not of my own making. Someplace new. I feel differently now, a bit more stupid and a bit more wise, and so now I know I'd have to step down to be so complacent.

Riding a motorcycle is an incredibly intimate thing. The bike we bought is a big one, and we sit tall - even with a regular pickup truck cab. As we move along, I feel like I can see everything, and nothing. It feels too awkward to lean around Marc to see the road ahead. Turning around seems foolhardy. But up, down, left or right - I see the faces of other motorists as they move themselves somewhere else. I see the billboards, the clouds, the building lights, the construction crews. And everyone moving, moving moving in their own place, with their own agenda, and all of us rolling on the same pavement to get there.

It's not just a visual thing, it's a physical thing. The motorcycle forces me into contact with Marc, our only barriers the protective gear we clad ourselves in. When we slow abruptly, our contact isn't even voluntary - it's all about the forces around us. I want to close my eyes and lay my head against his back but the helmet and my height are all wrong. And more than a physical thing I have to put myself into his sphere as he controls this expensive powerful machine that carts us both along.

Bigger than this, constant and ever changing, the wind. It rushes by calm but changing. As we shift, move around traffic, along the geography, it's constantly shifting. Through all my gear I can hear and feel the power of it. I can smell where it's been or where we've been. It's a sensory deluge, and calming in a strangely amazing way.

This experience, out there tonight, held something poetic. It's not always like this, it can't be. I don't think I could stand against the tide of such a siren song, if it were always like this. I'm not sure what made tonight so precise and I don't care to know - in my weakness, I would simply try to recapture it and face failure again and again. My heart wouldn't take such a beating.