Some years I’m lucky enough to teach a course I’ve designed called Writing for Life. In it, I help students write personal statements for scholarships, internships, or professional and graduate schools. I also work with them as they write personal essays. My aim is to help students see that writing is inextricable from thinking, and, as such, that writing is an important part of a reflective life, no matter what one’s eventual life path.

All students have been affected by COVID-19. But I have particular sympathy for the students of the Class of 2020, who have been denied those important, bittersweet last moments of triumph, expectation, and longing that compose the final weeks of a college career.

As a small way of compensating some of those students–as well as to highlight some outstanding work from my class–I asked three students who wrote particularly excellent final essays if I could share their work here.

The final assignment was to write about an important object in their lives in a way that case light on the object, on the writer, and on some concept or idea that could only be reached by thinking about the relationship between writer and object.  This year, I gave students the choice of reflecting on their experience of the pandemic. I think it will be clear which direction each student chose. At the end of the essay, you can learn more about the writer.

Today’s essay is by Connor Onitsuka. It is titled Split.

The author’s bike, front left

Split

            It can’t be that hard, right? The thin tires on the 52-inch road bike stared me down as I hoisted myself over the seat. What are these things where the pedals should be? Setting my feet on the clip-on pedals, I rubbed around on the smooth, oval-shaped pedals to try to get a better grip. When I shifted my whopping 112 pounds of weight onto the cracked seat of the bike, the pale white frame creaked a little. I pushed off to a wobbling start, straining my hands on the short bullhorn handles, struggling to stay balanced. After a block, though, I was getting used to the thin tires. Faster. With each revolution of the wheel, I felt my anxieties whip away, my stressors left far behind. Before I knew it, my twists and turns around the block had taken me right back.

“How was it?” Mom asked. She told me she’d pay for half of a cheap road bike so I could shuttle myself to and from school, since she worked over forty minutes away.

“I think it’ll work.”

I spent my years of high school running. Not in the literal sense: I quit cross country my sophomore year. The competitive aspect of cross country, the meets, the expectation to improve, and the daily time commitment drove me away from it rather quickly. Instead, with my new-used bike, I pedalled away from everything I loathed, as fast and as often as I could.

For a beginner’s road bike, the vintage Bianchi I found on Craigslist in my sophomore year wasn’t all that bad. Mom and I took it to a bike shop after we bought it, where we were told that a few spokes on each wheel had cracked. It rode fine though. Mom paid for the tune up and every safety-related item imaginable: a helmet, 650 lumen light, Kryptonite U-lock, flat repair kit, and some shiny reflectors to tie around my ankles at night. The bill came out in the hundreds. Though expensive, it was not the last price Mom would pay after we bought the bike. Rather than simple, reliable transportation, she bought my liberation – from my responsibilities, from school, and tragically, from our relationship.

By high school, my near-perfect relationship with Mom had changed drastically. Throughout my parent’s divorce, I spent most of my time with Mom, who won primary custody over me and my sister. We preferred spending time with her anyway; Dad was an ass. Mom has always been caring and silly, and provided a solid foundation for us throughout a chaotic divorce. As my sense of humor and identity developed through elementary and middle school, she and I would banter about the girls I might or might not, but definitely didn’t like, or how my sister might never stop wearing striped skirts and checkered knee-highs. Unfortunately, the once playful banter between Mom and I became harsh and hurtful when I started high school.

Mom and I fought and bickered daily after the first semester of my freshman year. She questioned me about my choice in friends, my time spent playing video games each day, or why I was acting like I was high on a drug I’ve never done. We drove to school in a tan 1999 Camry that was sunbleached and crunchy, constantly requiring some kind of tune-up or replacement. The Camry was a replacement for Mom’s reliable Honda Odyssey that had been totaled in an unfortunate run-in with FedEx.

Unlike the Odyssey, riding in the Camry was a trap. Not so much because it was unreliable—although it was: the windows worked about half of the time, and the locks even less—but because when I was in the car with Mom, it was lecture time. On shorter drives, I would get a quick check in on my attendance or a comment about how Mom hadn’t slept well because I was up all night yelling at my video games. On the longer drives, quippy remarks would metamorphose into a full-fledged life lesson I’d heard four times before. I felt penned in by the Camry, and I figured that I could probably get to anything within the city faster on my little white bike.

It’s hard for me to tell whether getting a bike was ultimately beneficial. Aside from the obvious boon of physical exercise, it helped me find a new pastime after quitting soccer and cross country. It saved me from playing more than 8 hours of video games alone in my room, instead shuttling me to my friends’ houses, where we could play video games together in their rooms. At the same time, I hurt myself and my relationship with Mom by getting a bike. I crashed an absurd number of times, with permanent scars serving as ugly reminders. Out of all of the safety items Mom had bought, I used the light when night came, the U-lock, and sometimes the helmet. I remember sneaking home a bloody meat crayon, lucky to have avoided broken bones and brain damage, avoiding Mom’s concerned gaze as I scuttled up to my room.

By my senior year, my goal of being valedictorian had been downshifted to “show up today.” A combination of boredom and stressors from home and school made going to class feel suffocating. Ironically, Mom had helped me buy my bike, and in turn, she lost her son for the better portion of two years. It turns out my bike hadn’t just provided freedom, it also contributed towards a twisted retaliation against my wonderful mom.

This retaliation manifested itself in my school attendance. Due to a failure in my high school’s attendance policy, I could have as many absences or tardies as I wanted, as long as I showed up to class once every two weeks. Mom let me bike myself to school, so over my final semester in high school, I accrued ninety-eight absences and thirty-something tardies. Though I typically attended my difficult classes like AP physics and calculus, my grades and classroom relationships suffered. For the first twenty or so absences, Mom received a call from the school and begged me to get to school on time. After weeks of daily voicemails, she gave up. Liberated from her lectures attempting to make me go to class, I capitalized on my victory by continuing my rampant streak of delinquency, unaware of the stress Mom was shouldering on my behalf.

My relationship with Mom improved drastically after I left for college. College itself was another attempt at an escape, but when I came home for the longer breaks, things were as though the last few years had never happened. We were back to our usual banter, complaining about my sister’s messy room or how our evil cat wouldn’t let us pet her. I still went on bike rides, though they weren’t meant to escape so much as a means of simple transportation.

Petty crime had been steadily rising in Portland while I was away for school, according to Mom. My now rickety old white bike, despite no longer looking like something remotely worth stealing, disappeared one afternoon. The U-lock was left cracked and discarded a few feet from the bike stand. For the rest of the summer, I opted to take rides with Mom in her old Camry that had just crested 200,000 miles. What once guaranteed long lectures with no escape became another place Mom and I could make up for lost time – I was happy to ask for rides, or drive when she didn’t want to.

The bike had been stolen once before, too. During my junior year, my attendance began wavering, especially for classes scheduled earlier in the mornings. Shortly after winter break, I woke up to the sound of my laptop playing YouTube videos, still running by autoplay from the night before. It was already 10:00. At this point in my high school career, I still felt remorseful for missing class. I was at school by 10:30, my hair greasy and clothes soaked by the perpetual Portland drizzle. In my haste I managed to forget the U-lock, but I couldn’t afford to miss another class to go get it. Doing my best to conceal the lack of a lock, I rested the contraption between a few other dingy-looking bicycles.

Inevitably, the bike was stolen during class and I was left stranded at school. Mom was strangely understanding on the phone, rushing home from work to pick me up. We spent hours searching the school and surrounding park for signs of the bike. Miraculously, we found it and two other bikes locked to the railings at the parking lot furthest away from the school buildings. Mom suggested I lock my bike to the railing with my own U-lock she had brought from home, and come back in the morning. My bike made it through the night, and the next day, the foreign lock had disappeared, along with the two other bikes.

To this day, I don’t understand why Mom worked so hard to save my bike. She knew it granted me the freedom to be absent from the house and from school. Maybe she assumed I’d find another way to escape anyway. I’m afraid to ask, mostly because I feel ashamed that I used the freedom she offered to hurt her. Though I haven’t voiced it – I don’t know why, either – I’ve been doing my best to make amends. The second time the bike was stolen provided a perfect opportunity to assure Mom I no longer felt the need to escape.

I didn’t consider it much of a loss when my bike was gone for good. Financially, the bike was probably worth less than the steel it was made of. Emotionally, I blamed the bike for the time I lost that I could’ve spent with Mom. Despite my unfair assessment, the bike was dead to me. I was happy to drive around with Mom, who had just started working from home. We took the Camry, still chugging along, to go bowling after dinner, to bubble tea shops and cafes, and sometimes nowhere, just to chat. High school-me would have immediately gone out to get another bike. In fact, Mom offered to help me find another. I declined under the reasoning that I would only be there for the summer anyway, leaving unvoiced the excitement of more rides in the Camry.

Last summer, my sister finally nabbed a driver’s license and utilized Mom’s Camry to its fullest extent. Out of necessity, I searched Craigslist for another road bike, and once again, Mom offered to split the cost. My new bike, a beautifully marbled black racing bike, took me to and from work downtown. It didn’t see much use outside of exercise and transportation, though. When the Camry was free to use, Mom and I would head out to the store to find ingredients for a new recipe to test, or to a bar, where we drank BFK’s (coffee mixed with Bailey’s, Frangelico, and Kahlua) to gab and gossip. After college, I’m sure we’ll take the old, reliable Camry out to keep making up for lost time.

I’ve been trying to train up to a marathon. When I first mentioned the idea to Mom, she was hesitant but supportive. Over winter break, we drove from store to store, comparing different running shoes that could live up to the arduous 26.2-mile task.  I found a pair of shoes I liked, and took them for a test run around the block. Taking off down the street, I felt comfortable knowing that my feet weren’t whisking me away from anywhere or anything in particular. At the end of the test run, I was happy to find myself back where I started, with Mom.

“How are they?” She asked. Once again, she offered to split the cost.

“I think they’ll work.”

We had a nice drive home.

Connor Onitsuka, who is from Portland, Oregon, double majored in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BCMB) and Neuroscience at Hendrix college. He’ll be taking a gap year to shadow and work as a scribe in Portland, while also spending time with his cat and drinking bubble tea.