Sarah Myers
THE RIDE
You’re buying tampons, brushing your hair, cleaning the crud off the kitchen table, and the sight of your own stupid fingers reminds you that the bottom has dropped out of everything. Then you’re talking to a colleague or a friend or a weird and lovely student, and you smile with every inch of your teeth because you’re there with them (you are, you really are), but you’re also not there, hearing, as you do, the constant low hum of am I real? and isn’t it strange we’re all just skin bags for cosmic particles? and how can someone you trust with every careful corner of your bones betray you? So you picture the time when you were eight and you managed not to die when your stepmother made you bike for miles with blood streaming down your leg from that fall through the rusty sewer grate because she said you ruined the ride, or that morning when she chased you around the house with an open palm and you barely managed to get your brother back in his highchair (screaming, screaming) before you ran up the stairs two steps at a time. And you remember that this is how you did it (not die)—by acing every math test, and singing Cyndi Lauper songs at recess, and giggling at the word boner with your best friend, but keeping every day at a distance, eyes hung heavy on the horizon, there, but not there, pedaling, pedaling, pedaling, trusting your small heart would hold. So you listen to that sweet student talk about her cat and her dreams of grad school and will you write me a recommendation letter? and of course! and thank you! and of course! and thank you! and of course! while your mind is moving through the madness of missing the body that betrayed you, or puzzling out (again, again, again) how you could’ve let your guard down at exactly the wrong moment, how you could’ve imagined that body would never leave you bloody and biking for miles. So you say, Yes. Yes! I will write you the most beautiful letter in the world.
Sarah Myers is a Minneapolis-based playwright, theater artist, and essayist. Her plays have been published by Playscripts, Inc., Spout Press, and New Madrid and produced in New York, Chicago, Austin, and Minneapolis. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, New Letters, TDR: The Drama Review, Studies in Musical Theatre, among others. She holds an MFA in Playwriting and a PhD in Theater from UT Austin.
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