Thank you for reading my new memoirette, 8 Continents: A Love Story. Think it’d look good on your bookshelf? It’s available as a paperback or ebook on Amazon!
epilogue
2020
For five years, I carried a compass that guided all my decisions. It pointed me away from external expectations and toward the things I love. It led me to meaningful experiences, solid friendships, a satisfying career, and a fulfilling partnership. And it disappeared as soon as I achieved my goal.
This might honestly be a familiar feeling for a lot of people. Like dropping your kid off at college: “Holy shit, I did it! It was so much work and there were times I had no idea what I was doing, but I still did it! Only… now what am I supposed to do?” Now add on the idea that I might die soon — which was probably also a familiar feeling in 2020.
But I wanted to be brave, if death was what it was going to be. I had lived a damn good five years, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to reap all those benefits of the premonition and not pay the cost. We all gotta die sometime, and if anyone tried to argue that 34 was too young, I’d tell them about Cassim Mkanda.
He was one of my Form 3 students back in Chikweo, the kind of student who could get A’s if he put in the time, but was content to coast through and enjoy high school instead. It was like he knew how his life was going to go — work in South Africa for a few years, save up the money for a house and some land, marry a nice girl, be a father, play soccer every Friday after mosque — and that sounded just fine to him. When he played the medicine man in a school play, The Love Potion, he tied rags around his waist, smeared himself with chalk dust, and leaped around like a frog making “Oooga-booga!” noises.
He died from diarrhea when he was 21. It wasn’t part of some cholera outbreak. Just bad water, the kind everybody in Africa takes a chance on sometimes. He was a migrant worker in South Africa; there was no way he could afford a doctor, or even a couple Loperamide tablets. For want of Imodium and Gatorade, Cassim shit himself to death at an age when I was riding bikes in Slovakia and starting to realize life was worth something.
Death is fair: It comes for us all. It’s life that’s not. It sends some people bad water and other people husbands.
Doug asked me to marry him in August 2020. It was terribly romantic: We were playing chess and drinking Beck’s at Shawn O’Donnell’s Irish Pub in Everett, Washington — just off I-5, across the road from the Quality Inn. The way I tell the story, I was actually winning for a change, and Doug wanted to distract me so he could put me in checkmate. He just rolls his eyes and reminds me that the day he knew he wanted to marry me was far more romantic. It was a bike ride in Yellowstone. We shared an apple on a hillside with no shoulder, where no car could stop, and continued on to a part of the park with the charming name “Mud Volcano.”
“Nature is a disgusting miracle!” I observed.
Then we bombed it downhill past a mile-long traffic jam. When we got to the front of the line, we saw what was causing the holdup: a herd of bison. They were close enough to toss an apple to, looking stubborn and grouchy at all the attention they were getting.
This is the magic of bicycles: What would have been a traffic jam on vacation transformed into “the time we rode our bikes through a herd of bison.”
Of course, the premonition never actually came true. I didn’t die, and I didn’t get married. Turns out it was just a dumb stoned thought all along.
… so what?
Who cares if the start of the journey was foolish? Beginnings are meant to be left behind, and every step was in pursuit of the things I love: bikes, travel, and beautiful, improbable moments of human connection. Besides, it’s not like I’m never going to die; the premonition willeventually come true. Death may come in the back of a pickup truck, in a mosquito bite, in a drink of water, or in a breath, but it’s coming, and for that, I’m grateful.
Because without death, love wouldn’t mean a thing.