I spent two years of my life citing my feet as chief mode of transportation. I dashed around tourists and over potholes, between droplets of mystery precipitation and through sauna-level humidity. In passing, I gazed passively at all walks of people and smiled at all breeds of dog; I witnessed firsthand how rapidly Manhattan evolves and jaywalked across Broadway whenever the spirit moved me, although I always looked both ways. I was an M.F.A.-bound graduate student in New York City with a part-time job at a university library—I had to cut corners somehow. But my desire to be pedestrian supreme did not make me feel anachronistic, eccentric, or even hardy. Walking just made me happy.

My childhood and adolescence were set in a house an incline away from the Pennsylvania State game lands, but my parents could have set up home on the tundra as far as human interaction was concerned. Neighbors stayed hidden from our view, and friends stayed hidden from my social life. Walks through our woods were successful in passing the time. Like all other activities in my day—reading, listening to music, doing homework—walking was a solitary one. Yet, the loneliness I felt when I was in my room—the loneliness that neither my headphones nor a good sentence could fend off—never reached me on my walks. I was free from the presence of others and, in turn, from the anxieties they provoked.

Life was all very dreamy and comforting in the woods, but trying to mask the flat taste of loneliness by calling it “solitude” didn’t make it any easier to swallow. I knew something else was out there—whether it was good or bad was debatable. Change seemed like a useful tool in locating that something else, continuing my life in New York like a jarring enough adjustment. The city seemed to promise an education that would wash away the stale flavor of my undergraduate years. To prove my resolve, I opened a checking account with $600 transferred from my hometown bank. $300 fled from it within the first week. By New York standards, I was a pauper. Self-sufficiency warped my mind into believing the subway was an extravagance. The luxury of spending eight minutes exhaling into a stranger’s back in a rattling subway car was an option only when it was too cold, wet, or dark to walk. My earnings, meager as they were, could be used on better things.

I pressured myself to walk everywhere. I don’t remember the very first day I walked to work or the state of my navigational skills, but I got to the library on time and with some residual energy. Out of excitement over starting a new life, I found myself with the drive to set out from my dorm in the Financial District at 11 a.m., walk the forty-five minutes to work in the West Village, reshelve books and wander through the library for five hours, finish work at 5 p.m., hang around the neighborhood for three hours, then attend class until 10:30. If I hadn’t been so fearful of passing through Chinatown in the dark, I probably could have taken the pedestrian route back home.

Walking so much callused my feet. If I wore a particularly confining pair of flats, my toenails rubbed against each toe in succession of size, leaving little pink holes in the skin. Removing my shoes in my dorm room exposed bloodied socks. One evening, I pulled off some hosiery and a few meek trickles of blood followed, traveling from a medium-sized toe and tapping the hardwood floor in three faint splats. My mother feared varicose veins. I opted to believe age wouldn’t catch up with me if I walked quickly enough. I had no time for deterrents. If there was sensation in my feet and legs, then I could walk. In perhaps the only cases in which I was thankful my bubble of solitude had popped, spells of clumsiness—I once slipped on a moist patch of sidewalk one block from the dorm—gained me a sympathy I never knew when I walked and tripped over large fallen limbs at home in the game lands.

Discomforts were worth the memories. I imagined that few subway passengers arrived at work with so many colorful sights to recount. Like my duties at work, my route there was routine, yet the thrill of passing from one city district to another never grew old: setting out in the Financial District, dodging the Oliver Peoples glasses and trench coats; walking westward through Tribeca, the cafes with chalkboard signs for $5 cappuccinos tapering off as I advanced into Chinatown, turning west again and into a scene of brand names that bore legitimacy once I reached Soho. Standing as an indicator that I was on the home stretch was Houston Street’s traffic-coned intersection, with Sixth Avenue marking the final blocks in my path to relief, enthusiasm, and a day of blissfully tedious tasks.

Underneath all the enthusiasm, work still meant giving my hours to someone else, and I always welcomed the end of my shift warmly, relieved that I could again use my time freely. So it went until summer arrived and I was given longer hours and a promotion to circulation desk assistant. Now, rather than dreamily arranging books in call number order, I was required to be in constant contact with customers, and I soon became acquainted with the library regulars. This was how I met the boy with the bicycle.

If you stood the boy with the bicycle next to the conventional idea of a handsome man, it would be similar to placing a sippy-cup of dirty dishwater alongside a bottle of Evian. Grease separated his hair into matted clots of brown. He usually wore old t-shirts, sometimes with noticeable holes around the shoulder blades, sometimes turned inside out. He never, ever wore socks. But his unkempt nature only endeared me further. I noticed every one of his physical features before I noticed his eyes, which, it turns out, were neither windows to his soul nor even beautiful; more than anything they were animal and beady, not really green and not really blue, more a muddy amalgamation of the two with barely discernable pupils.

So, his inner psyche was a mystery, but this didn’t matter because what really attracted me to him were his legs. From my first sightings of him, in the library or getting onto his equally unkempt bike—a spindly vehicle with the remains of a French flag sticker eroding off its neck—I immediately associated him with the customary tight black trousers seen on the young, skinny, and jaded twenty-to-thirtysomethings of the city. He first earned my devotion by defying these assumptions. It began the day he wore the aforementioned saran-wrap-tight trousers—but in fuchsia. As the humidity rose, he ditched clingy trousers in any hue and replaced them with cut-off shorts, and I realized his legs weren’t knobby and rickets prone like those of the young men I would see any evening on the Lower East Side, but instead were toned and sinewy and tanned.

After two or three conversations with the boy with the bicycle, I stopped marveling at his willingness to speak with me and fell into a lust so primitive that any bright or engaging parts of my mind shut down whenever he was near. Most of what I knew of him was gathered through eavesdropping, and with each new piece of information I acquired, he became more perfect still. He was quiet and so was I. He liked animals and I did too. He wrote, and I liked to think I could. The most important fact I learned about him, however, was that his legs were in such impeccable shape because he traveled everywhere on his bicycle, the Rocinante to his Don Quixote. Even during rain and snowstorms, he depended upon the bike, which I quickly learned to peel my eyes for outside of the library and on weekends. On some lucky Saturday afternoons, I would notice a flash of flannel from the corner of my left eye as I walked up the Bowery and he rode down, and even though my presence went by unbeknownst to him, I smiled the rest of the way home.

“I don’t feel like riding my bike in bad weather, but then I tell myself not to be such a baby,” I heard him say to a friend, on a rainy day when I had conceded to the subway. His drive inspired me. His maxim appeared strikingly close to my motto, “Just think of the money you’ll save if you suck it up and walk.” I began taking a closer look at my own motivations. If my commute to work earned me a piece of solitude in a city as over-populated as New York, I had to be doing it for a greater reason than simply saving $80 a month. Maybe I walked to defy progress. If I could spend sixteen hours of any day worrying over how I conducted myself when a boy—a boy, not a man—was afoot, then my life must be pretty cozy. Walking was a physical vow to people like my grandmother, who as a child had to walk a mile to and from school each day. Shirking inertia kept me from being even more melodramatic than I already was.

We met up outside of the library one Friday at the end of the summer. I didn’t reveal my walking preoccupation, just mentioned the human obstacle of tourists I had to dodge when I chose to walk along Broadway. The boy with the bicycle responded by asking, “Why don’t you just shove them?”

Our parting hug only confirmed that I loved him. I had been using emotional training wheels for any male conquest that came before him. The rapture I felt over the boy with the bicycle was the real thing. For the first time in my life, I felt a swell of kindness for someone, just because we were both resourceful in our commutes. The silly thoughts and delusions I wrapped myself in, the words I read, the music I listened to, sometimes even the walks I took, did not matter any more. He was my sole fascination, and I would do anything to have him and give some of my overflowing goodness to him, everything except express my sentiments openly.

After the parting hug, I thought I would have the power to defeat inarticulacy and form an actual relationship with the boy with the bicycle. I sprinted to work the following Monday, over-anxious for him to show. When he did, he appeared distant to the point where it felt like a blatant snub, like I had made some mistake over the course of our get-together. When we did begin speaking again, I became more and more tongue-tied, fearful that my intentions would be clear and he would not care to reciprocate. A new semester began and my shifts changed, as did the likelihood of seeing the boy with the bicycle on any given day. In spite of a few odd bright moments when he made it a point to speak with me, aloofness was the general character of our encounters.

My agonies over the boy with the bicycle tainted my walks home, warping them from invigorating excursions into shameful roundabouts. Fridays were the worst because my shift ended at noon, and I was left to survive on a splinter of serendipity for two and a half days. I walked slump-shouldered down the university steps, slowed by the dread that, once I reached home, I would sweep any notions of productivity or ambition under the bed and opt to cry over him—or sleep to ward off crying over him—instead. I would put on my headphones and keep my MP3 player in a convenient pocket, but I never let the music get the best of my emotions. Every song hit me with the same indifference I felt when I listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees or a similar band I had barely any interest in—not annoyed enough to hit the forward button but still leaving me to question why they were on my music-listening device in the first place.

Although the route home was strictly eastward, I always headed west until the horizon started hinting at a view of the Hudson River. Retracing my steps back to the library, I usually found myself lost in the West Village, where the streets curved to a stop, changed names, and then resumed three or four blocks later with their former names. I found my way out by getting as close to the library as possible without actually getting a sight of it. If I walked by it again, and he was getting on Rocinante, I might either risk a failed exchange or look like a stalker. Instead I continued in the direction of the dorm, making half-hearted turns through Soho and Chinatown, working my way east then angling west again. In Tribeca, I usually had to admit I was pretty cold and tired and take a straight path the rest of the way to the dorm. In my room, I upheld my commute’s aimlessness and either cried or slept.

A year after the fruitless lusting began, I got a proper, salaried job and left the library for good. The boy with the bicycle knew I was leaving, and he gave me a handshake in parting. If I had wished to admit my feelings, that would have single-handedly killed my will—literally, it seems. After I left the library, I expected occasional sightings of the boy with the bicycle, riding down Bowery or a nearby, less renowned, street. But the serendipity has faded, and I never see anything. I walk less now. A move to Brooklyn and my job’s placement on the Upper East Side have stretched my resilience to its snapping point. My feet are much smoother for it.

Moving to New York shoved me toward adulthood. Desiring the boy on the bicycle, however, was the actual stumble into adult territory. The distress his name alone subjected me to was something a girl goes through sooner or later, so, as I lay curled into a tearful ball on my dorm room bed, wiping my nose on the collar of my t-shirt, I comforted myself by mewling, “Welcome to the real world; you’ve found that ‘something else’.” And that something else made me even more miserable than wiling away the hours in the den of asexuality that was my Pennsylvania home’s bedroom.

The most important lesson of all that the boy with the bicycle taught me was this: to finally familiarize myself with the bland taste of loneliness. Even though I passed scads of people on my commute, ambling about the city on my own two feet made me feel like I was in my own little world, back in the forests of Pennsylvania, away from any entity that both breathed and spoke. It made me feel great. I think about the walks I took to the library as often as I think about the population therein, and the former comforts me more. The simple, solitary things are still what please me the most, even after, or perhaps due to, realizing what humans can do to your heart.