The Loneliest Motorcycle

The Loneliest Motorcycle

Stephen L. Harrison

I was six

when I crossed a desert

no map could name

and found you there.

You leaned into the wind

like something waiting

to be remembered.

Paint blistered.

Chrome dimmed to ash.

Your handlebars tilted

as if listening.

I am the loneliest motorcycle.

I knelt beside you.

My knees left pale moons in the dust.

I didn’t know how engines worked.

I only knew

how waiting felt.

Your wires hung loose,

veins without current.

No ignition.

No spark.

No promise of roar.

I tapped the fuel tank softly,

as if it were a sleeping animal.

It answered with hollow quiet.

I told you about roads

I had only seen in books —

long ribbons of possibility.

I described wind

the way other boys described fathers.

How it might hold you steady.

How it might carry you forward.

I imagined painting you red.

Scarlet, even.

Bright enough

to be chosen.

We would pass the biker gangs,

free of burden,

no weight upon your saddle,

no one asking anything of us.

Just motion.

Just horizon.

But even then

I noticed

the broken glass of your lights,

the loom of wires

unravelling like thought.

Some things are not waiting to start.

Some things are resting

because they must.

The garage I invented for you

was dry.

No shouting.

No flames licking at walls.

Nothing burning

that could not be mended.

Evening stretched long.

The desert widened.

Dust cooled.

I sat with you

until the sun thinned to ember.

For the first time

I was not asking you to move.

Just two shapes in the quiet —

metal and bone —

learning that stillness

is not failure.

It is survival.

And when I left you there,

I carried something home —

not the motorcycle,

not the dream of red paint —

but the knowledge

that loneliness

can sit beside loneliness

and neither has to roar

to be real.