| In his poignant, personal essay "Death, Love, and the Solace of a Million Motorcycle Parts," writer Kenneth R. Rosen weaves his experience racing and building motorcycles into a story about coping with the death of a family member, seeking to engineer his way through sorrow the way he is able to engineer his way through a throttle assembly. Death and estrangement are messy in a way that a mechanical object is not, and Rosen felt comfort in the surety of inanimate objects. "Logic worked like the printed circuit board inside a motorcycle's electronic control unit, all leads connecting where they should, the world a mess of signals dictating our behavior," he writes. "When I rebuilt the bike and pressed the ignition, the fuel pump wound, starter motor clicked, the engine cranked to life and told me I had gotten everything right." Relationships, alas, are not so simple, but as a writer, Rosen is willing to take his readers on a delicate journey through his loneliness, even as he struggles to plan his family's future. "If I can be vulnerable and invite people into that feeling of desolation, there's a comfort in that," he says. "We all yearn for our lives to be different in our own way. Why should we suffer that as a defeat and why alone?" He takes the reader from a cold tool-strewn basement to a near-death experience on a Florida highway to a moment of bright realization and maybe redemption with language that's raw and beautiful in equal measure. Sarah Fallon | Deputy Editor, WIRED |
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