It wasn’t the climb from the shore to Pointe Reyes. It wasn’t the increasing grade that dug at me. It wasn’t the exhaustion from cycling for the third day in a row.

It was the nature, the Pacific ocean water lapping at the coast, and the sound of the my wheels spinning that suddenly held me in a melancholic moment. The silence and the loneliness of the stillness that gripped me in a vice.

I followed the figure in front of me—moving steadily ahead. Unexplainable feelings made me want to stop. I could feel the usual place of tension…tighten. As the climb appeared, I wavered. There was a moment where I thought that I would fall onto the pine leaves, almost falling onto the edge of the asphalt. I could slow down right there and fall with me clipped in.

Instead, I cried out in surprise almost to call out to my riding partner when I did lose my balance. Magically, I didn’t fall out and unclipped to hold myself and stood on the road.

“What happened?” he asked turning his bike around to meet me.

I mumbled something about the chain and the gears. Then I took a deep breath in an effort to soothe myself. I put one hand on my forehead, as if there was smarting wound there that I was rubbing.

He noticed and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing…I don’t want to talk about it,” I said and faced away—a move that I almost never take as confrontations are my style.

I gulped down water, staring at the road watching the cars wind north and south. No attention paid to the figures on the side of the road. We were in some sense…alone.

“Do you want to go back?” he asked.

“No…let’s continue.” I said.

Then I said as we started climbing, “Tell me a story.”