To write and ride

Part 1

She was gone. I rubbed my eyes a few times, fanned my hands in the air where she last stood, as if perhaps she was exactly where I left her but had somehow become invisible. But it was no use. She was gone.

What does it mean for something to disappear I think? Where is the 'undo' button for this catastrophe? Where, the fuck, is my bike? The tears began to roll as the realisation hit. Here I was almost at my destination in Palestine, having come 4000 miles on my bicycle, Tara, with only 100 left to go and she had been stolen.

Tel Aviv has the highest bicycle theft rates in the world I learn, greeted with endless shrugs to my hopeless pleas for help as I am told “this is how it is, everyone has their bike stolen in Tel Aviv”. “But not me”, I cry, “not Tara! I built her myself, I cycled her here from England!”

I spent two days searching for her. This is how to come to know a place I think - sobbing through its streets. I meet Israelis, Palestinians, migrants, tourists and pilgrims and we share our stories of loss and suffering. I realise then how small this loss is, compared to so many others, especially here.

Part 2

It is 4 months later and I am on the beach in Tel Aviv when I see her. She is being ridden by an old man. I notice the green flash of her 'mixte' frame first, and then her pink forks, the yellow detailing around her joints, the Brooks saddle... Tara. TARA.

I begin to run, barefoot along the glass smattered promenade next to the sea. “Wait, hey, please,” I shout. The bicycle and its rider speed on. I run. “Please”, I say, “do you speak English”? He turns now, but still, does not stop. “Please” I yell, “please stop!”And then finally, he does, allowing me to splurt out the story of how I built this bike with my own hands, cycled thousands of miles on it and its theft and the last few months of bicycle-less despair, how this bike is not just rubber and steel but the heart and soul of a woman and the hundreds of hills she has climbed on it.

And then, after much insistence on his part that it was not he who stole the bike he decides he will sell it back to me for the price he paid. “ANYTHING”, I say. The cash is exchanged, the bike is returned. And I walk back along the beach and through the cobbled cafe lined alley ways of Neve Tzedek, tearful, triumphant and overwhelmed by the travelling madness of heartbreak, loss and surprising ecstasy.