Warning: If you're a fan of the Vagina Monologues, you'll enjoy this post! If you're not a fan, you may want to skip this one...
From an essay I wrote recently called: "My Vagina Rides Bicycles":
My vagina rides a bicycle.
She always has, I just didn’t know it until I hopped on one, and we realized that we were both riding a bicycle, me and my vagina.
It’s something we do together. She gets forgotten, otherwise. Activities like walking, swimming, dancing, sitting still... somehow the limbs take center stage in all of those. She’s hiding up in that dark corner between my legs, and stays there quietly, just observing the strangeness of life.
But when we ride on the bicycle, she gets to explore. We careen around corners, pump up hills past cemeteries and elementary schools, through valleys full with golden stalks and fat cattle with the sun on their backs. We go to her favorite places; the pond where we he kissed me, the field that we hugged in, the meadow where friends ate blackberries from one another’s hands and licked their stained fingers. Those delicate folds of flesh must be steering, the way we streak down Main Street and sneak through alleyways. You’d think the world was her oyster, with the shell split wide open and pearls rolling everywhere, and her trying to snatch every one. You’d think that life was an orange, with the zest stinging her eyes and nose as she peels back the skin and sinks her teeth into the flesh of it, feeling the juice drip down her chin.
She’s a consumer, my vagina. The best kind. She’s never wanted the money, but the greed and the gluttony was always there. It’s not that she wants more than anyone else, she just wants as much as she can get her hands on. She’s not
looking for happiness, she
knows what happiness is, and any chance she gets she takes it and swallows it whole, laughing with her whole throat. There’s no hesitation, with my vagina. She doesn’t think about things, she doesn’t ponder them quietly in dusty attic spaces. She goes out into the storms and the sunshine, she moves through the world and she knows. She knows a good thing when she sees it. She knows happiness, even when its dressed up in its best camouflage. She knows these things, spots them quickly, and if I stay out of her way she’ll swallow it all, laughing like it’s a rock song.
I spent my whole life trying too hard, and not listening enough to my vagina. And then I sat on a bicycle and began to peddle. A funny sensation came over me, as my legs pumped up and down and the machine moved forward. I looked down at my arms, and they seemed impossibly long and beautiful. They ended miles away from me, with hands gripping the handlebars. I was certain they were someone else’s hands, the way they rested there, effortlessly, guiding the steel machine as if it was an extension of itself. My legs, too, with their spandex shorts, looked distant as they worked up and down, pushing the pedals down, up, down, up.
I was unable to control them, to control any of it. I felt like someone else was powering it all. There was someone else conducting this symphony of limbs and steel tubes and rubber tires. And when I looked down at the place where it was all meeting, the place where the machine and the girl came together, I discovered the driver was clearly my vagina. She had known how to ride bicycles all along.
She had been waiting for me to figure it out. She had been curled up there, in the darkness between my legs, humming little songs to herself and waiting for me to find a bicycle. Not just any bicycle would do, though: it had to be
the bicycle. It was to be the machine that would unite us all, that would move us across paradises and wastelands in the same day. It was to gleam in the sun and glimmer in the rain, it was to be a machine that was built for escape, not just trips to the grocery store or commuting to work.
We had ridden many bicycles, but what we needed was
the bicycle. We needed the steel-framed symbol of childhood freedom and women’s liberation. It needed to keep up with my vagina’s appetite, moving fast enough that she could eat the world as we went. It needed to take us too quickly down mountain slopes and too slowly back up them, it needed to have a little bell to make children smile, and it needed fenders to keep the mud off our back. It needed these things, and my vagina knew it. She had just been biding her time, waiting for me to figure it out.
It took 5,000 miles for me to learn to listen to my vagina. It took three and a half months of pedalling, swearing, screaming, and laughing for me to understand that the desire, the appetite, the wisdom and naiveity of travel were all manifestations of my beloved vagina. I did not move her: she moved me.
When people tell me they’re proud of what I’ve done, I wish I could tell them the truth: that it was actually my vagina that biked across America. It was her feet on the pedals, her hands on the handlebars, her head inside the cheap plastic helmet. It was her life on the line, and her happiness at stake. This is her adventure, and I was just along for the ride.
