Change

The cool water swam around my sweaty ankles, instantly mollifying a dozen bug bites. I remember catching my breath there, standing in the sand and lake. I had climbed a fence to get to the tiny beach and ripped my shorts in the process. They were pleated khaki and ill-suited for a 36-mile bike ride, but then again so was I. The sun was beginning to set and my muscles ached as my head swirled. In that moment, I was not too sure that I would make it back to Burlington. My bed, food, and comfort were still a dozen miles of bike path away, but I was buoyant regardless: I had done it! I had biked 18 miles and more, all the way to the causeway, all the way down the causeway! I had seen the entirety of Burlington Bike Path, I had gone until the path ended abruptly at a ferry stop, and now I was headed back.

A year before that, I was working out on an elliptical machine as I often did. The seconds ticked down closer and closer to zero and my feet pushed harder. My legs felt number and number until, finally, the words "begin cool down" flashed across the LED screen. And there it was: 300 strides more than a week ago. I did not always weigh myself when I went to the gym, I had spent most of my life avoiding the things, and even though their numbers scared me less and less, I told myself my workouts were not for the sake of numbers.

And then, I was on an island in Denmark. My bike's tires were slimmer and taller than the bike I had ridden down the causeway a year past, and I was too. 60 kilometers had already ticked past and the wind had burned my face and lips a bright red. When we finally reached our destination, the world's largest corn maze turned out to be closed on Sundays. So we sipped our beers from Samsø's microbrewery and no one was dismayed as we stared out at the Baltic Sea. "We should swim," someone said, and then we were all in there; the bitter, brutal cold a glaze of simultaneous numb and sting. And then there were the 60 kilometers back, and they came easy.

I suppose it is not an easy thing to change, I should know that rather well. Though however well I know it, each day I live I try and pretend the lesson a little less true. I have seen unfathomable distances, and woken up a different person. I have seen my face bulge and melt until the only thing familiar in the mirror were the brown eyes looking back. And perhaps, despite everything, that is why I think I can change the world too.