I was 11 years old the last time I rode a bike.
The morning of February 15, 2015, I woke up thinking it would be an absolutely ordinary day. The Florida sun was shining, the flowers blooming, the alligators so elegantly lurking in the water, ready to chomp some little toddler in half. Everything was exactly as it should be. I decided to go on a nice little bike ride, down the street and back. Of course, as it was a beautiful day (and I’m an idiot), I was not looking where I was biking at all. All of the sudden I felt a huge THUMP and a screech unlike any other. Horrified, I looked down in my wheel and see a white ball of fluff spinning fast, intertwined with the metal spokes of my bike.
I heard a scream from across the street—my elderly neighbor flagging me down.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” he yells, “YOU RAN OVER MY BLIND AND DEAF DOG?!”
Okay, reader. Obviously I feel awful about this but:
(1) why the fuck would you keep a dog that’s blind and deaf, like, what kind of quality of life is that?
(2) why would you leave this dog in the middle of the road?
(3) imagine being a blind and deaf dog—living in a large world of silence and darkness and then THWOOSH you’re rolling around at the pace of a washing machine on the high speed spin cycle.
Anyway, the dog is fine. He lived. But every single time I lay eyes upon a bicycle (kind of a lot, I go to Stanford) all I can hear is the deaf shrieks of a fluffy little pet, so tell me, who really got hurt the most—fucked over and beat up by the metaphorical bike of long-term trauma?.
