ABOUT MISSY.MOTO

In 2013, I decided I was going to learn to ride motorcycles.

I did not grow up with them. At the time, I knew almost no one who rode. The first time I was allowed on one—an 80’s Honda CB— I was fourteen and crashed it into the earthy green muscadine vines and red Georgia clay of my then boyfriend’s parent’s garden. I laid on the throttle when I needed to lay on the brakes…nube.

Fifteen years later, I bought my first bike. A silver Suzuki TU250x.
Damn.What a gorgeous machine, just for me. I was beside myself with excitement. And nerves. And embarrassment when I stalled out at a busy traffic light.

A couple of months later when moving apartments, I had to force myself to sift through old keepsakes, childhood treasures, journals: it was one of those gnarly moves. In this emotionally grueling, pretending-to-not-procrastinate process, I discovered something that surprised me: at the top of a yellowed page in an old composition notebook was a list entitled “Things I like.” The first word on the list was “Motorcycles.”

In a list of more than twenty items, little bebe me had decided the first thing I liked, above all, was motorcycles. Wtf. I had never been on one when I wrote this.
Where the hell did this come from?

I was a voracious reader as a kid. Something I read, somewhere, must have created this indelible image in my mind. It’s been there as long as I can remember.

It’s like this: I’m a bystander, a girl in front of a red barn, surrounded by wide open country fields and a wide open sky overflowing to its edges with the setting sun. The horizon is orange-red-yellow-four-shades-of-purple-in every direction. And.

In the distance, it’s coming quickly, but not quickly enough, because my heart is racing.
I have to know what it is, this black speck moving towards me.
I can feel it. It’s buzzing, it’s alive, it’s unafraid.

I can start to make out the shape—it seems wild and unattached but wholly belongs to the scenery.

I want to know who it is…and my heart pounds a couple beats faster, a couple beats faster, here they come, here….wtf…here…she comes…. on….her bike! Who is she? Who is this crazy, courageous woman, completely independent and free?

Slowly, quickly, wildly, calmly, confidently, freely whizzing past me—hair whipping behind her under her helmet, no other person, no man, no child in sight, the sun threatening to disappear every second she glides over the warm country asphalt.

This chic, this chic doesn’t give one SINGLE damn. She’s FREE.
She’s HER. She’s living. Right. Now.
She’s a woman and she gets to be on her own. Dangerously serene, in control. Content. Here, now. No striving, no trying to be something she’s not. No worries keeping her hostage. No one telling her there’s something she oughta be that she’s not.

I was just a little girl, no idea how to understand or voice any of this, but this woman riding into the country sunset, she was the woman I wanted to be.

My guess is she’s the reason “Motorcycles” made it to the top of my childhood list. I’m grateful to her, whoever she is.