August 11, 2004

The following is a transcript of notes made on July 31, the 17th day of my bike ride:

I lunged at my loves as soon as they emerged from the orange hunchback. Trevor got out first with wet pants and flowers in his hair.

“I’ve pissed my pants too,” I said pointing proudly at my wet crotch.

“These things happen,” he said, hugging me again. “We’ve been swimming.”

Zorianna and Simon were also wet and happy and I pulled them into awkward embraces one after the other, lifting them momentarily into the air and we laughed like mad children in the afternoon sun on the warm driveway.

“How thin you’ve grown,” Zorianna said.

“Lies,” I cried, and ran with them to drink penguin wine on the sunny deck, our limbs and glances joyfully intertwining until we became intolerably drunk and giggly. Trevor took his flower and tenderly fixed it in my hair.

And I told them things about my journey, about the cum and urine on my sole pair of pants, about sleepless nights in barns and my rare moments of insight.

“I’m a creature of both love and hate,” I confessed, telling them I now had people in my life positively detested.

Trevor’s dad interrupted my drunken confessions to feed us the first real meal I had in ages. I devoured not only my own slab of meat, but everyone else’s stake as well.

Afterwards, because it was dark and we were still drunk, we decided to go climb mountains in the night. We walked on desolate country roads to reach the ski slopes, the moon before us burning like a red beacon in the sky. With our arms around each other, the four of us slouched towards the reservoir on top of the mountain.

And once we reached our destinations our drunkenness fell away from us and in an instant we became four marvelously naked creatures swimming in the clear water, splashing, laughing in the night.

Half an hour later, we shivered madly on the shore in the cool mountain breeze and huddled together in naked embraces for warmth, teeth chattering, and hands on backs oddly tender and moving. Simon put his shirt on our naked backs to dry us, and we left the night’s shore as a single creature descending the mountain in one long embrace. Our feet made a maddeningly uniform rhythm on the stony path.

Simon and I walked home after the rush of descending the mountain, his arm on my shoulder. We whispered secrets and dreams on the country road, both of us overwhelmed and savagely excited, while Trevor and Zorianna staggered in the dark behind us with their visions and photographic anomalies.

In the dark we were all one and one was all.