Then, on Memorial Day, a man named George Floyd was lynched a few blocks from my home and the world burst into flames. The cocoon of quarantine ripped open to reveal a righteous, fearless, empowered creature. The protests that unfolded that night and the next day and the day after that, up and down the surrounding streets consumed me. Those days are a blur to me now. I saw a man in clean red Nikes ride a horse bareback down Chicago Avenue, and I saw bare-chested young men chase a police car up that same street, the car driving backwards and veering fearfully as if it was not youth approaching but an armored tank, a monster or an army. The sleepless nights, the ominous beat of the helicopters hovering overhead. The sounds of flashbangs and sirens and that bitter taste of smoke in my mouth when I woke up the morning after the bookstore burned down. The sensations of an uprising, they live in my body still.
Dysregulated after months of social isolation, I struggled to find my place in the movement. The morning after the Third Precinct burned to the ground, a transwoman in my community posted online about needing a bike to get around to the protests. A few hours later, I delivered the FUJI to her house. She met me in the garden with a cigarette and bare feet. Last night's makeup clung to the corners of her eyes and her hair was a glorious tangle. She looked luscious against the backdrop of blooming lilacs. I wanted to hug her, but restrained myself for fear that I had the virus and would pass it on to her. Instead I leant the bike against the fence between us as a neutral distance.
I looked at her face, such a welcome change from looking at screens and digital images. In her eyes I could see the future, how she would ride the bike down Lake Street, through the fire and teargas, with rubber bullets pelting down from on high, up on the pedals, while a friend perches on the bike seat, clinging confidently to her hips, the two of them so fearless, femm, and righteous, on this machine of liberation, biking through the chaos.
"Take it for as long as you need it," I stuttered "and I'll just get it back from you when..." I trailed off. What is time in a pandemic, what is an appropriate length of time for a loan of this nature?
She took a drag of her cigarette and, exhaling with a dry laugh, she finished my sentence,
"When all of this is over."
YOU ARE READING
Four Sided
Non-Fiction"my FUJI is a tool of liberation" four chapters of life in Minneapolis
