The Girl Who Bikes to Weddings

When I left to bicycle alone across the United States, there was an engagement ring on my finger and an understanding that I would come back.

My fiancé and I had been together for more than four years. We’d fallen in love over a shared passion for exploration. But for him, adventure had become a story to warm your hands over as you sat in overstuffed chairs and drank wine from matching glasses. For me, it was still a quietly ravenous need that tugged at every thread of me.

By the time he asked me to marry him, our engagement was a way to make me stay. I had become so cowed by his constant anger that I didn’t know how to say no. When men are afraid, they make women small, and when women are afraid, they make themselves even smaller. In the years before I left, I folded myself in ways I did not know that I could bend until my body had