This is a #storygram (mini-stories) from my Instagram, which you can get to via the social media links at the top of this site. I do my best to make them a daily thing for you to enjoy and share with your friends! I really love making them, as they allow me to simultaneously scratch my photography and writing itches while I’m busy with filmmaking. Thank you very much for reading and sharing them! Don’t forget to check out my film Portfolio too!
The Story:
Every day, he raced himself. He knew all of the faces along his route but not their names. He only knew they called him “Cyclone,” which he assumed was because of the ferocity of his cycling–always as fast as he could go.
He often wondered where they thought he was going in such a hurry. The truth was he didn’t know. He only knew what he was in a hurry to get away from–his life.
“Pick a job that makes good money,” his father would tell him. Go to college. Make money. Invest it. Everything he had been told to do is exactly what he had done. Yet, he hated his life. He hated his job. And no matter how fast he pedaled, it never seemed to be fast enough.
At least that is how he felt before he dropped a dollar. He remembered it well.
Riding on rage, he was pedaling so furiously that one day a dollar fell from his pocket. When he came back through, he saw a young girl pick up the dollar. He knew it was the one from his pocket because he could see it had the same ripped off corner. She looked so happy that he felt himself catching the contagion of her smile. It was the first time he had smiled in years.
From then on he began dropping dollars intentionally. Sometimes he dropped a five or a ten or even a hundred. He loved that no one knew it was him. What would they have called him? Bankcycle Man?
It brought him so much joy to watch them picking up his dollars that he began to love his life. He began to love his job because he had the ability to earn more so that he could drop more. It became a competition with himself.
So, when the cancer finally took him, they didn’t show up at his funeral. They had never known it was him. But the money was no longer there and neither was Cyclone.
Eventually, they figured it out. They would visit his grave, where his tombstone simply read:
“You dropped far more in my heart every day. Thank you. Cyclone.”