New Beginnings

By Christina Rapley

I want to tell you a story, I want to tell you about a series of events that lead to me making my way back to something I had left behind a long time ago. I have told versions of this story to a few of you, maybe you have heard a bit of it, maybe you haven’t heard it at all.

Whatever way I tell the story, it always starts the same. A few years ago my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, I don’t want you to pity me. But I do need you to know because it is an important part of my story.

I remember the day I found out, I was working a double shift at the Dragon Bar. My dad had called me and left a message which he followed up with a text message, very unusual behaviour for the man who usually only attempted to contact me twice a year at the most.

I made my way to the office to call him back and that’s when he told me, I don’t remember his exact words. I only remember crumbling into pieces downstairs in the dark, crying so hard that I couldn’t form words, just empty gasping sobs.

What followed was six of the hardest months of my life, from working in the bar to travelling to Wales to see my father, each time thinking it would be the last. Watching the cancer eating away at him until there was nothing left at all. It was a blur of grief, late nights working, drinking far too much, and travelling to and from Wales. I was so incredibly blessed by my chosen family of friends in the bar who rallied around me and covered my shifts so that I could spend some of those last few months with him. I am eternally grateful to them for giving me that gift.

There was so much that I wanted to say to him, so much I wish I had said before he was sick. He had been a terrible father but he was the only one I had. I thought we had longer to resolve everything and then suddenly here we were. I visited him more in those six months than he had visited me in the last 10 years.

It may sound cruel but I resented him and his sedate existence, he chose to live without love or friendship or adventure or travel. He was everything I wanted to escape. We spent time together and I realised that this man had done nothing remarkable with his life (with the exception of yours truly of course). He wanted nothing more than his lonely routine of life, the more I saw him the less I understood him.

On one of the long journeys to Wales I stopped and walked into a service station, through the florescent aisles, designed to make you part with your boredom and your cash simultaneously. I walked into WHSmith and something caught my eye, it was a copy of an adventure motorbike magazine and on the cover it said ‘Explore Morocco’.

I hadn’t thought about it for a long time but I used to ride a motorbike and I had been part of a motorbike tour up the Atlas Mountains in Morocco years before so I picked up the magazine and flicked through to the article. As I read I was transported away to that trip. To the camel coloured dust that flew up behind the orange bike. I remembered how I felt alone in the desert, standing up on my bike with the wind against me. How the mountains grew closer, the tops shrouded in clouds. There was no one else there and for a moment as I looked out around me, it felt like the whole world belonged to me. It was all mine. The dust, the sky, the trees, all of it.

I rode over gravel and rocks, high up in the mountains with the edge just feet away from my tyres, yes, it was terrifying but I have never felt quite so alive. Just remembering it made me feel something I hadn’t felt in years. Illness and death have a way of making you assess you own existence and I knew I wanted my life to be more. I wanted to see the world and have adventures, to be afraid and alive.

It was like something switched in me and right then and there I knew that I was going to buy a motorbike again. Call it a (pre) midlife crisis, call it fate, call it whatever you like, but I had to make something good come out of this shitstorm that had been my life for the last six months.

I got my hands on a motorbike and I spend a lot of time alone, out on the road. My dad has long since died, he may not have been the best father but I loved him none the less. I think of him often when I’m out of the bike. He didn’t raise me, but he did help to create the person I am today for better or worse.

His last few months brought us closer than we had ever been before. But that passage of time also changed me and for that I’m grateful.