I don’t know why I looked in that car. Usually my gaze along the Van Starkenborghkanaal is only focused on my front wheel and the asphalt.
A gray road, brown water, some trees and sometimes an inland vessel. You don’t cycle there for the view, you cycle there to pick up speed. You can look around you later.
Yet my gaze suddenly lifted. I saw a delivery van approaching, I think it was blue, and for a moment I thought of it as a soulless obstacle. A cyclist rarely sees a person in a car, certainly not a cyclist.
I did see her. And once I saw her, she never left my mind. She screamed. I didn’t hear anything, but I saw that she was screaming loudly and without sound it was crushing.
Of course I didn’t know why she was screaming. I didn’t know anything, except that it was a beautiful Monday morning, the kids back to school, me on the racing bike and nothing wrong for a while.
Her scream contained everything. Her mouth couldn’t open any wider, her eyes couldn’t be more desperate. She had put her hair up loosely, or perhaps thoughtlessly, because none of it mattered anymore. The locks out of the way to make way for the tears.
I looked at her, she looked straight ahead. Not to the road or the water, to the sky above, but to something no one else saw. Her hands were clenched tightly on the steering wheel, she leaned forward to add extra force to the scream.
Although he must have been heartbreaking, I wanted to hear him. Then there had been a sound that also died away, now there was a muted image that remained. I still hoped the scream was liberating, but as long as he was locked in the car I feared the worst.
In a flash she was gone. I looked back for a moment, her desperation lost in the unmoved straight lines of the landscape. My gaze dipped back to the asphalt. My front wheel spun so fast it looked like it was standing still.