Don’t Try
 
Every morning I reach for the doorknob, I think of all the ways I could die today. It’s not morbid—just math. The road doesn’t care how well I slept or how politely I signal. I pull on my padded jacket, the one meant to keep my shoulders from popping out like loose hinges. My gloves promise to keep my wrists from folding backward if I go down, and my boots swear they’ll keep my ankles intact. Every piece of gear feels like a small prayer to probability. I take the cover off the bike, and there’s a flutter in my chest, the kind you get before a bad idea that still feels good. The key turns, the engine growls awake, and I give her a soft stir of the throttle. That sound right there, my morning cocaine, is the only therapy I’ve ever trusted. With all these worries still crowding my head, I slide on the helmet, drop into first gear, and let the world come to me.
 
I didn’t get on the bike looking for therapy. I got on because this land was too foreign, its people too loud, and the damn world pretending like it hasn’t already ended. The engine coughed, the road stretched out, and suddenly I could breathe again. Some widowed academic in a suit might call it “phenomenological psychology.” I call it not going crazy. The throttle doesn’t lie. It shakes the bones, clears the head, and for a few miles, you almost forget how bad everything else is.
I sit on the porch before every ride. That’s where the fear starts talking again—the same voice I’ve carried since I was a kid. Fear of deep water, of falling from the edge, of disappointing my father, of never being the right kind of son. Fear of sin. Fear of God. Fear of not believing in Him anymore. Every ride begins with a reckoning. My hands tremble a little when I put the key in the ignition, and I tell myself it’s just the caffeine, not the voices.

Three years in this country and I’ve read enough to lose whatever certainty I came with. Science stripped the colour out of my prayers, and literature filled the silence with doubt. Bukowski said, Don’t try. I don’t—not to believe, not to disbelieve. Still, before every downhill, before the road flattens into Main Street, I catch myself reciting Ayatul Kursi under my breath. It slips out like muscle memory, the last remnant of faith clinging to exhaust fumes and asphalt.
 
I take a right, the signal clicking like a nervous heartbeat. My downstairs neighbours—the Jesus couple—are on their porch again. They wave sometimes, sometimes not. I wonder what they think when they see me: the foreign kid with a Muslim name and a death wish on two wheels. Then I catch myself doing that Bengali thing again. I worry too much. I intellectualise my emotions. I realise I’m wondering too much about what others are thinking. I laugh inside my helmet, a soft, private rebellion.

I press the clutch, feel the weight shift under me, and finally, the speed comes. The fog on my visor clears as the air cuts through my breath. Two houses pass in a blur of colour—one with a sagging mailbox, one with an American flag faded by too many summers. I am reaching the stop sign at the end of the street. The engine quiets down, but my heart doesn’t. It’s there—that thin border between stillness and motion, between who I was and who I’m trying to become.

Every time I slow down, fighting against the adrenaline, I take it as a sign that I still want to stay alive. this is good. Here comes the stopping ritual: front brake, left foot down, right one on the rear brake. Did you know? 80% of the stopping power on a bike comes from the front wheel. Did you know? 75% of all biking accidents happen on your lower body. Did you know? 60% of all biking accidents happen in intersections. Finally, did you know that 100% of all biking accidents involve some form of inalertness or stupidity—either on the biker’s or the driver’s part? I think of these statistics all the time. I think there’s a part of me that’d rather become one of these statistics than the ones I’ve been dreading for the past three years.

I downshift, engine coughing at three thousand RPM, as if it’s protesting the weight of those numbers. The road hums beneath me, steady, indifferent. I grip the clutch a little tighter, like holding on to the last bit of control I have left.
 
I come to a complete stop. I look left to see if anything might kill me, and then I do the same for my right. I don’t feel welcomed in America anymore, but I’m glad nothing is out to get me at this moment, not even the lady with a Trump sign on her porch, so I take a right and ride on.

This part of the ride is fun. There’s a small downhill, thanks to rural Virginia’s moody landscape, and I don’t mind the few bumps on the road because I go up to forty-seven miles an hour and steer past them looking cool. The boys in the frat houses I pass by look at me—my black jacket, my sleek bike, my tinted visor, and my air of cool. Little do they know it’s all a mask just to feel alive. Little do they know these few miles of commute is all the control I have in America. The couple square yards of surface area I cover with my bike is all that’s truly mine in this country. I have no family here, nothing else to call mine, and everything else doesn’t want me.

Third gear, I feel the wind. Time to stop at the first intersection. should i?
I stop at the intersection. red and neutral. I think to myself how I’ll make it through this intersection sixty out of a hundred times. Maybe it’s the physicist in me that thinks of the other forty—in those parallel universes where my cold corpse had to be transported back home. Let’s not get morbid here; my poor mother wouldn’t be able to take it.

That’s who I think about at intersections. My innocent, ever-worrying south asian mother. I think of her when I stop behind the left side of a car so the driver can see me in their side mirror. I leave just enough space in front and just enough in the rear so I don’t get sandwiched if some stupid piece of shit slams the brakes too late. My mother doesn’t know about my new hobby, of course. If random strangers and well-wishers already react with panic when they hear about it, I’m afraid my mother would faint and then throw a fit. She’d cry, and she’d blame my dad for my misgivings. She’d remind him how my uncle had to undergo brain surgery after his motorcycle accident—probably at an intersection—and how I must’ve inherited that daring, bad blood from his side of the family that makes me do all these unconventional things.

No mother likes to see her child grow up. Mine certainly doesn’t. What troubles her more is that she doesn’t understand why I turned out this way. Why I found a different kind of trouble than my brothers ever did. Why I chose to shape my own path in America. Why I picked up guns and motorcycles after being a textbook nerd all my life with chunky glasses, always too shy to talk to girls, always too hesitant to talk to anyone. 
 
Don’t worry, ammu. I’m as confused as you are.

The light turns green. I step out of my reverie and shift to second gear. The road beyond is too slow for first and too dangerous for third. I coast somewhere in between, the clutch sliding under my left hand. As per ritual, I lean into the corners of Lexington’s curvy roads and finally reach my destination: a small parking spot right across Woods Creek. I don’t like parking at the deck—too many people, too many eyes, not enough greenery. As per habit, I put the side stand down, kill the engine, feel my heart rate settle, and take quiet pride in making it here again, unscathed.

I look for her.

Nothing can make a man move mountains within himself if not a woman. After five hundred miles, five near-death accidents, and a burnt right leg, I realised one Saturday morning why I changed this summer. Why I went from a socially isolated, science-crazy recluse to someone who wanted to be perceived. It was a girl with a smile—a smile that never seemed foreign to me. I speak five languages, but I couldn’t find a single word to tell her how I felt. My fear, my shyness, and my Bengali heart kept it all to itself.

I crave a cigarette. Then I crave coffee. She doesn’t drink coffee, and I like mine black.

Now, with my bike parked on its side stand and the travesty of my life parked on a standstill, I start another day in the small microcosm of Lexington. Afresh, anew, born again from throttle therapy. Until tomorrow, when I’ll do it all over again.
I don’t try anymore—to believe, to belong, to arrive. I just ride.