N.K. Murray

I didn’t want to ride today.

Big shock.

I haven’t been eager to ride this year – whether it be because of work or life wearing me down – regardless it hasn’t been my first priority. Hell, it hasn’t even been my 5th or 6th priority. But, I scheduled a ride today because I knew I wouldn’t want to ride today, and knew I needed to ride. I needed to get out on the road and worry about something else other than work or my sister. I needed to ride to clear my angry thoughts. I’ve found that few things clear my mind the way the riding does; hitting balls at the driving range is a close second, although that comes with its own frustrations as anyone with a bag of clubs can attest to.

Today is just another Sunday for me. Or rather, I try to make it just another Sunday. I stay off social media. I avoid reading my email. I’m even the asshole who avoids sending ‘Happy Father’s Day’ texts to her father-in-law and brothers-in-law, because it hurts me to not send one to my father or my uncle. So I scheduled a ride with the bestest ride buddy ever. . . and where do we ride? Back where I grew up. Back where I had parents.

Full disclosure – that was my choice. I sometimes wonder if I poke the bruises I have to actually feel something, or if I’m some sort of masochist seeking out the pain. Freaking North Tonawanda kills me sometimes. I passed my dad’s work, I passed the Seabee memorial my grandfather dedicated to get to Gratwick Park. I looked out at the river I used to see all the time back when I had parents and saw all of the happy people out on their boats and flying their kites, and was just in a shitty mood. As Dave and I left, I full prepared for a demoralizing, soul-sucking ride in the humidity, and instead, was pleasantly surprised that I could keep up with the beast in front of me. (Seriously though, Dave is an incredible person and a monster on the bike, and I wanna be him when I grow up.) I wasn’t going out to break any records. I simply just wanted to get out and calm my demons who have been raging this week. I haven’t been riding as much as some of my cycling brethren, primarily because work has been. . . well, a lot of work. When I got on the bike today, do you know what my sole goal was? I didn’t want to cry. That’s it. I just didn’t want to cry on my bike again. Too many times, I’ve gotten going on my rides and have spent countless hours with tears streaming down my face because I couldn’t keep the anger and the grief away. I didn’t want to do that today, because I was utterly exhausted, and once I started, I knew I wouldn’t stop.

We stopped at the falls, because I told Dave that I wanted to see our end game for the ride. I needed the motivation, the goal to remind me where I would be in 40 days when I was done crossing the state on my bike. When we got going again, we stopped at the rapids. Watching the water flow. No, not flow. Watching the water roil in front of us, was like listening to the little fuckers in my head telling me I’m not good enough, I haven’t trained enough, I’m too sad, I’m too angry. Oddly enough, I kept imagining drowning them in the deep blue of those raging waters.

Today’s ride was easy. I know they aren’t all like that – in fact, I would go so far as to say the weight of my demons makes most rides harder than they should be. I could have gone longer, could have gone farther, but instead, I went with Dave and got a beer on Webster Street and felt shockingly normal. I don’t normally feel that way in NT. I feel tight – like my skin has a bad sunburn and wants to crack and peel. I get this pit in my stomach thinking about all of the things that are different now than they used to be, and how for one moment, I would give just about anything to have a minute to walk back those days when I was angry and had parents, instead of being angry because I don’t.

I have a confession to make. For all of the anger and sadness that comes from not having my parents around, there is a feeling of loss that differs from the actual loss. I lost pieces of me when they died, and that much is obvious to anyone who knew me then and knows me now. But more, I lost a future where I could have talked with my parents as an adult about all of the things that I couldn’t say when I was younger. I have a bright and shiny memory of talking back to my dad as young kid wearing a Houston Astros jersey he lent me. He hit me so hard in the face my nose exploded down the front of the jersey – this bright red shock of blood. He then yelled at me not to get any on the front of the shirt and to catch it in my hands. I have these visions in my head of confronting my dad about how damaging it was for me to hear him say me that he loved me, but that he just didn’t like me very much. I overextended myself time and again in high school because any time I failed, he told me I would be lucky to flip burgers at Burger King if I didn’t buckle down. I have these instances, where I remember the feeling of him shoving me up against the wall by my throat when I talked back to him as a smart-mouthed 19-year old. I can feel his hand around my neck, banging my head on the fucking wall behind it. I lost him 3 years after that, and the last thing I remember him actually say to me was if he could smoke in my new car, and me saying no. I can’t remember him saying anything else.

And then I’m reminded about the time he took me to the McDonald’s parking lot when I was 15, after he found something I wrote saying that maybe it would be better if I wasn’t around anymore. I think it was the second time in my life my father cried in front of me; the first being when his mom died. He asked me why I wrote it, and then told me that much like all things, it would pass, and I would be okay. I think about that all the time now, and think about how what I wrote damaged him. Did I think he would read it? Nope. . . I didn’t think anyone read anything I wrote, and in some ways, that’s the same way I think now. I don’t write to please people, I write to get the words out of my head, and if they are read, well cool. I wasn’t a huge diary person, but somehow he saw that I was sad, saw that something was wrong, and took me away from the house to tell me he loved me and that my presence on this planet was valuable.

It’s hard to reconcile the man that I’ve lionized, with the man who damaged me in so many ways. A friend once told me that just because he may not have been a good guy all the time, doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good guy. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good dad, even if he wasn’t a good dad all the time. He supported me in all of my endeavors, whether they were the ones I wanted or the ones he wanted for me, and he was there for me unlike some of my friends’ fathers.

So I didn’t want to ride my bike today. But I did, and it was good, even though it was on Father’s Day and in NT. I suppose I need to take the wins where they come and allow everything else to fall as it may.