Cue the Van Morrison.

You know it's been a good day when you get home and have to wring out your underwear. It's been hours, and I still feel a little damp.

Today was a storm, a downpour, a gullywasher, a deluge, a tempest. Not a thunderstorm, because there wasn't any lightning or thunder. Just rain, and lots of it, steady and patient, beating down from the clouds with no end in sight.

So I took a bike ride.

I knew it wouldn't be letting up any time soon, and that I really wanted to get out of my apartment and move around for a while. I knew I'd get wet if I went out, and get really wet if I biked around and hit more drops than if I was simply walking slowly, and that I'd be coming back to my apartment when I was done with the ride so however wet I got, I'd be going out knowing I had a place to come back to and dry off.

And I knew, with absolute certainty, there'd be nobody else around in the park.

So I grabbed a bike and started riding.

Being by yourself in New York City is no mean feat. Being by yourself outside, even more. Being practically alone is something I almost never encounter living here - there's usually an awareness of people being near you, whether it's music from other apartments drifting through a window or someone walking a few blocks away. It's generally a sense of isolation instead of being alone. I find it hidden away, indoors or high above or far down below: in empty movie theatres, on forbidden rooftops, on subway cars in between secret turnaround stations. I've never had it outside like this before, in such a public space. In Riverside Park today, I was alone. The few people I saw - a couple other bikers, a couple dog-walkers, a couple couples, a homeless man sitting on a bench underneath a tree with his carts and himself in makeshift plastic raincoats - were all by themselves, in their own ways. The most we did was wave to one another as we passed into and out of each other's lives. A moment of recognition, a moment of connection, and then the clouds settled and you didn't see them anymore.

By the time I biked about twenty blocks, I was dripping, and by the time I got to twenty-five, I saw there wasn't any choice but to either turn around before the usual point on my typical loop, or go right through the huge puddle.

"Bring it," I said aloud, to the rain and to the trees.

The puddle brought it. Coming, and going, it brought it, as did the rest in the park, and it took maybe three to get me soaking and five for my shoes to be a lost cause. Sopping, and soaked, and wet, I could feel the water just sloshing around my sneakers. My socks, lost. And I was still only on the first third of the ride.

Because there were so few people around, I'd pull my mask down for long minutes, breathing in the water, letting it hit me all over the face. It smelled, and felt, more like swimming than I've done in ages. Fast movement through water. I'd look up at the trees sliding by, across the river out to where I couldn't make out New Jersey, ships outlined in the mist by their lights. There wasn't much sky to look at. There wasn't much of the clouds to take in. Just the rain, beating down.

So much water, rich in my face.

I heard a train coming and biked over to the grate to see it down below, and I got a glimpse before my bike's wheels and the metal of the grate met each other and kept going, sliding along, and I slipped and landed on my left side. I got to my feet and raised my arms in triumph, shouting out a victory sound for having fallen and gotten up, and kept going.

I sped across streets, waiting for the lights and sometimes having the good timing to catch them and bike right through the intersection. I looped around at the end of the park and turned back, and by then, there'd been enough rain for water to come shooting up out of the ground.

There are these grates in one part of the park - I think to collect the water and move it along through the sewer systems, but I can't be certain anymore, because when I saw them today, they were geysers. They were jets. They were erupting, making noises I'd never heard before, something organic and mechanical at the same time. The utter power of the water being forced upwards because there wasn't anywhere else for it to go, while it fell down at the same time. Downwards, upwards, heading down as ordinary heavy drops, going up as hard white mist.

I stopped to watch, even leaning over the grate to see if it'd hit me, but it was done by the time I got down the hill, and I kept pedaling on.

By the time I biked back up the last hill and parked the bike, I didn't have a dry inch left anywhere. I'd gone out in exercise clothes I knew could stand up to getting wet, and my sweatpants and t-shirt were sodden and heavy, clinging to me, but since all of me was covered in water, it didn't feel so bad. My shoes squeaking when I stepped, that was weird, but I wasn't upset about that. I'd known it was coming.

I went to the ATM afterwards, and got some cash, and stopped by a pet store to get some more birdseed for the pigeons, too, because I knew being utterly soaked as I was would be a good way to get some social distance. It worked. It also impressed people, to hear the park had been so empty, and I'd been crazy enough to head out in the storm and enjoy it.

Honestly, I haven't enjoyed the park, or a bike ride, in a long time so much as I had today.

Because I got to play in the water, and I got to be alone.