The Green Bicycle

"Did you know that you are 32% times more likely to die from falling off your roller skates than from your bicycle?"

This came from Amina, hunched up on the chair, legs crossed under her, her thick horn rimmed glasses peering out from above her iPad, frizzled strands of silver white hair peeping out from the top. The iPad looked massive in size in comparison to her hands. Like a giant newspaper. Which was precisely what it was serving as, at this moment, as she flicked through assorted gossip and semi-interesting factoids, with no-doubt limited veracity and equally uncertain utility.

"Hmmm", replied Mike, wheeling out his bicycle from his bedroom, hating every moment of this "wheeling out" process. A process which involved carefully manoeuvring his full size and quite heavy steel 90s and somewhat rusty retro mountain bike, now converted into trusty and somewhat unashamedly muddy commuter, around the living room coffee table and through the hallway door frame. A doorway that already had a few telling scratches and ugly bumps, chips in the white paint from previous clumsy attempts at wheeling green bicycles through it. Trickiest were the handlebars and pedals, that seemed to be magnetically drawn to any surface. Mike carefully picked his path...

Despite himself, he thought about the apartment rental deposit he would most likely forfeit to the landlady, who, from all accounts, was the stereotypical Barcelona landlady, who would not hesitate in the slightest from unfairly claiming and keeping for herself the "refundable" deposit, the fianza, even in the best of times.

It was, he was aware, a needlessly negative thought. It may not even happen. Heck, he was not even thinking of moving, so even if he did and even if she did pull this dastardly move, the loss was a long way away in the future, and a hypothetical future, at that. Besides, he was most decidedly assuming the worst of his landlady, who, to be fair had shown no signs of being an evil person.

And most pertinently: He could afford the loss of this amount of money, even if it occured. Money was, fortuitously, he knew, not a problem in his life. He should be grateful for this, he knew, and tried to repeat to himself occasionally. And yet, here he was now, irritated at the hallway for being narrow, at the coffee table for being in his way, at his landlady for her future inevitable "crime" of inevitably cheating him of his deposit, and even at Amina, for her blase disregard for his irritation, as she sat there, cross legged, sipping her tea and reading her digital newspaper.

"Hmmmm", he muttered. "I am heading to Barceloneta for the Philosophy Club thing. May be late..."

Outside, briefly, his mood lifted itself, as soon as he was on his bicycle and away, pedalling. Noone could be depressed for long, once up and cycling, he realised. It was a lovely summer day, almost comical in its predictable loveliness: The birds (parakeets?) were chirping in the trees. They were green, just like his bicycle. With absurd positivity, his mind took this as a "sign" of some sort, to become happy. The blue sky above, unblemished except for a handful of thin wispy white clouds, stretched infinitely into the distance, into a haze that transformed seamlessly into the horizon, and became puffy greenish brown mountains. He had actually been to those mountains a few times, his mind quipped, helpfully. It was lovely there, too. Sharp turns in the greenery, beautiful views of Barcelona's coastline, and rugged Catalan countryside everywhere else. And the views of the city itself of course, a grid of smart houses, from which, at the centre, emerged majestically the Sagrada Familia, almost like a fairy tale scene....

A small part of his brain still resisted the positivity, clung on to his gloom, his despair, his depression, his "dark passenger". But the positivity was relentless. The dark passenger had no basis for its negativity, no real reason it could cling to, to stay relevant, up against the relentlessly positive barrage of beauty, energy and positive thoughts that came from the factory of pedalling endorphins, seemingly magically powered by the green bicycle, instead of the other way round.