Namely, on bicycles and a little guidance on living. I really don’t think I should be the person handing out slips of advice to unsuspecting readers, but right now I just know that I am beyond grateful for my four years at this school, for a kind of rare closeness with the people and the unabridged big love that has resulted from them good, bad and ugly I’ve experienced thoroughly during my time here. Each year, these spring months fling me into a state of incoherence, and I hope to release some similar doubts you may have about yourselves through these thoughts; now I’m just worried that what lies ahead is too existential and too stark of a contrast from my Junk articles, but let me continue.

There’s this video my parents have of the first time I ever rode a bike that I kept thinking about as I wondered what to write about in this goodbye article. Here, I’m in a little pink shirt and a little pink helmet and I’m pedaling just as hard as I can and the bike is inching forward and I’m crying, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it,” and all the while I am doing it, and maybe that is just what living is.

Maybe we will never know if we are really living—we sometimes can’t see the path of our own feet and we will always be thinking about when life truly begins, and all the while we are biking, biking, biking.

And maybe sometimes we will bike without our helmets on and wind will gust through our hair on sunny days, and at other times we will need a set of training wheels and also someone to install them for us as well as elbow pads and a bell on the handle-bars that we will ring to tell others “I’m passing by” or “I’m here now” or “I feel like I’m going to crash help help help.”

And sometimes riding a bike hurts your legs and you think about how cars can get to places much faster and maybe we sweat through our nice clothes while trying to balance in the bike lane, but at least we’re moving. I learned to ride a bike while yelling that I couldn’t.

Sometimes that’s how living is. It’s wearing a number of contradictions and inconsistencies that seem too complex to unpack and slowly collecting the courage to do it anyways. And sometimes an extended metaphor such as this one isn’t enough to fully encapsulate the unpredictable ride that life is. I think I like it that way. This state of incoherence is now where I find my peace at, and here, I’ll continue biking, biking, biking.