The End

(Briançon, France > Aveiro, Portugal | 30 June 2025 – 29 July 2025)

The End.

It is liberating to start a story with ‘The End,’ to start the day after a bicycle voyage with a minute of motionlessness following a harmless fall, and to watch the world rush by from the window of a train at a speed that seems more appropriate to the adrenaline-infused start of a journey, not the reflective pace of a month on two unassisted wheels.

Things out of order and life in fantastic contrasts beg a deliberate pause, a change in perspective: from the mundane (the silly tan lines of my fingerless, mesh biking gloves ridiculing the lightness of my skin) to the fantastically superficial (getting a manicure and hydrating facial after four weeks collecting dirt and drying out my skin over gravel, dirt, sand, and asphalt) to the natural (neat rows of eucalyptus and crowded uniform fields of corn making the imperfect pines that blanket the Ovar sand dunes seem to almost dance majestically and patternlessly in all directions) to the near divine (absence blessing me with yearning and appreciation) to the timely and timeless (letting reflections flow and be reworked, completed, and posted (or not) as and when and how they are meant, needling the linear timelines that are the generally dictates of my life).

I end where I stared, paying heed to a voice inside my head that resembles Poupine, my savior on Day 1 who gave me and my bike a lift in the direction I assumed to be geographically backwards whence she came to bring me to somewhere I assumed to be metaphorically forward in my journey. In reality and in surreality, I have spent a long month going back and forth in time and memory, in and out of space and place, through silence and conversation and love. I have ridden on two wheels into endless kilometers of contrast, adapted to the heat and changing winds, to the subtly shifting languages and cultures. To pace. To views. To time.

Once upon a time.