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When #6 pulled out of our campsite on Sunday morning, after spending nearly thirty-six hours with Ben and me, I stood dumbfounded and helpless leaning against the picnic table watching her go.

I don’t know why people do the things they do when they are in love but I do know that it is always worth it. Climb any mountain; swim any sea; all of that nonsense begins to make sense when you are in the throes of the heart. Everything you recently laughed at, scoffed about, or recalled only faintly as if in a dream, comes flooding back into your immediate sense of awareness. Certainly, it is most often painful and, surely, it rarely ends amicably, but for some odd reason, when you are in the midst of love, all else ceases to matter. This is why people become cynical and bitter when they are in a bad relationship (or in no relationship at all) and this is why teenagers believe they are capable of actually making a difference in this cruel hard world. They have love. All you need is love. Life becomes perfect and simple and requires nothing except what you are holding in your arms. What you are taking in and breathing out. What feels more a part of you than you ever felt about yourself.

Until it taken away. Until it is driving out of the campsite parking lot, waving forlornly, and (you are almost certain) trying not to cry. Until you are standing there watching this all happen outside of yourself and knowing you are powerless to stop it. Until the moment the door has shut and you’ve forgotten what love feels like because all you can remember is a sharp pain in your ankle rivaled only by the empty hole in your heart.

“Go and give her another kiss, you idiot,” Ben said.

I ran to her.

If you listen to the audio recorded during our trip it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish Ben’s voice from my own. Even I, from time to time, have mistaken one for the other and by June 26th, we had begun to lose our individuality as unique speakers of the English language. Claims have been made by certain relatives that there is a specific tonal (nay, guttural) quality that enters both of our vocal patterns when we are speaking with one another that is present at no other time in our lives. My mother insists she always knows when I am on the phone with Ben because I cease being intelligible and livestock react warily. But then again: no one in my family can actually understand anything Ben says, which is, probably, why they love him and it is also, probably, why he and I remain such close friends. We have never been able to truly communicate using a language that is acknowledged as containing the necessary semantic and lexical structures required for shared understanding. And because of this: we are very close.

Just hearing the sound of Ben’s voice brings me to laughter and whenever we review our audio entries together we stare blankly into the distance and grin from ear to ear with big bright Christmas Day twinkles in our eyes. Here is Benjamin’s first full entry into the audio log on Sunday, June 26th, after #6 left us at Iron Creek and we had ridden for some time and, for some time, had the realization that no matter how hard we pedaled we would be going no where fast and experiencing much pain the process.

BEN: June 26th, twelve noon. Stopping at the top of Elk Pass about 4,000 and change. Let’s see what we got for our money: we’ve been riding for one hour and fifty-six minutes — that’s two hours, folks. And, drum roll please: [Makes a very convincing drum roll sound.] An average speed of seven and a half miles an hour. And it was hard. Very hard. And, oh, let’s see, we went almost — almost! — fifteen miles. Oh what a morning. End note.

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