Yesterday I biked 66,5 kilometers (about 41.2 miles) around the German countryside. The wind turbines spun silently on farmland, their shadows splitting the light in lolling rhythm across the cornfields. Tractors moved about behind us or in front of us on thin roads and we moved out of the way, onto the dirt siding. Light rested on the sunflowers and weeds that made a fence between the crops and the roads, and the sun through the clouds split the air with heavy beams of light. The feint warmth made my face flushed. There was an unbroken peacefulness about the day, even with the pain from the bike seat and pedaling, sunscreen and sweat making my clothes cling to my skin.
Kevin, the friend I’m staying with this week, was my guide and google maps was his guide. We learned quickly that google maps doesn’t know the Germany countryside, but kept going anyway, once ending up on military land with signs warning us of landmines, and multiple times going down roads that turned out to be private driveways. We were barked at many times by dogs who were doing their jobs very well.
We stopped in two places. The first was a diner in Groß-Reken, a town near Borken. It was run by a married couple, a white German man and a Turkish-German woman. They learned quickly that I didn’t speak much German and defaulted to Kevin for communication. I had currywurst, fries with ketchup and mayo, and two beers. This was 33km into our trip and by then everything below my waist was pain. Bike seats, I’m convinced, were created to deter people from actually riding bikes.
The food was good and generic. “Microwavable,” as Kevin said. It was new to me and the people at the counter were kind so it was delicious in taste and experience.
The second place we stopped was a beergarten, where we waited out thunderstorms. An emaciated woman with a grey cloth on her head brought us a few beers like the Mother Theresa of bad decisions. Kind and gentle, sipping red wine across from us. A group of men celebrated a birthday and snorted tobacco off the backs of their hands, brown noses and riddled with small schnapps bottles. We got back to our resting place at 7:30 and after a shower, I immediately fell asleep.
I woke up at 3:30 a.m. with, genuinely, the worst muscle cramp of my life, grunting and gasping for breath in the same moment it was taken from me, writhing in bedspring squeaking hell. My calf was a brick underneath my skin. Afterwards, I lay breathing heavily for minutes or days.
It was so quiet after it finished, I realized the only noise during the spasm was my breath in my ears and the bed under me. In that empty quiet I felt lonely, with no hand caressing my back or telling me it was all okay now. I wished in that silence to go back to sleep or teleport to a time not long gone when someone would do that. I wished that I could fall asleep or just stop existing then and have the loneliness over with.
[Content warning: Discussion of depression and suicidal thoughts]
There are times in my life where I don’t want to live anymore. Very rarely does it get so bad that I think about how I would go about doing thus. A vast majority of the time it is nothing more than a passing thought, like thinking “Right now, not existing would be much easier.” These are scary places to be mentally, and it’s something that I thought about a lot before taking this trip, because what do you do so far away from support systems when your brain fears itself?
I will say, for stark clarification, that I did not get to that low point of ideation last night, but in those moments as the pain waned little by little, I did want to have some of the parts of me stop existing. The parts that feel the need for someone to caress my back after pain, and even the parts of me that sometimes want to die, I wanted those pieces of me just keeled over and done with. But these are facets of my brain that I will be hard-pressed to leave behind. This is what I thought about after everything.
I asked myself later, “How do you feel sad and think about this shit in so much excitement and newness?” And I realized that it just happens, really. Kind of just like any other time. It’s autonomous.
Everything is beauty around me and I can still feel things that are not wonder. But today was good, excepting some dreariness this morning, and everything is absolutely okay with the thoughts in my head, but right now I am awake and have some small fear that I will wake again in pain, wishing someone were by me, telling me everything will okay. So, I tell myself this as a mantra of goodwill. That everything will be okay.
-Daylon M. Phillips (08/10/2018)
Daylon M. Phillips 