"Bicycle love" response

“Bicycle Love” by Brianne Goodspeed is essentially a love story. Like all great romance novels, it’s clearly not love at first sight. It’s a mess. The narrator’s hopes and dreams have all been flushed down the toilet of despair and she’s feeling lost. It seems that she’s traveling on a whim with no direction. “But I didn’t know what I was trying to prove, or to whom” (141). Goodspeed accentuates the emotional turmoil that comes with any landlubber setting sail. To me, it wasn’t necessarily the complexity of words that made Goodspeed’s story so effective, but rather certain details that she revealed. “In front of me in the moonlit water, I could barely make out a sunken German boat… as a reminder of what the town had endured during the war” (147). She doesn’t sugarcoat anything, but casts the voyage in a rather harsh light. But it’s reality. All the small details that she drops like breadcrumbs only serve to drive the point home. Why else would one write about public toilets and rotten teeth? When all seems bleak, hope comes in little tokens of food, advice, and hospitality. “‘Un pélerinage,’  he said. You’re on a pilgrimage” (143). Goodspeed dances around the idea that the real landmarks worth seeing aren’t structures or landscape, but actually the people. It’s only in hindsight that she realizes that the things which she had originally loathed now held a special place in her heart. “The terror had burned off, like calories… The bike―which at first made me feel vulnerable―now empowered me” (147). It becomes clear at the end that she loves France, in all of its labyrinth-like beauty. The author masterfully brings the tale to a close by hinting towards the beginning of her own story, reflected in that of another. “I paused for a moment, appreciating her honesty, and then said, ‘You’re on a pilgrimage’” (149).