The Empty Pillion — What a Motorcycle Seat Taught Me About Loneliness

Every motorcycle has a pillion. It’s the seat behind the rider — that narrow pad where a passenger would sit, hands on the rider’s hips, weight shifting in sync with the lean, trust expressed through the physics of two bodies moving through a curve as one.

Mine has never been used.

Not on this bike. Not on the one before it, or the one before that. A quarter of a million miles, and the leather back there is still factory-fresh. No wear, no softening, no patina from use. It is the most pristine part of the machine, which is another way of saying it is the most untouched part of my life.

I didn’t notice this for a long time. Decades, probably. The pillion was just a feature of the bike, like the mirrors or the footpegs — something that came with the machine whether you needed it or not. I rode alone because I rode alone, and the reason I rode alone was that I rode alone, and the circularity of that logic was invisible to me because I never stopped moving long enough to examine it.

Then I wrote a book. And in the writing of it, sitting on an imaginary bench on the moon, talking to a woman who doesn’t exist about the things I’ve never said, I found myself describing the pillion. The empty seat. The space behind me that has been open for fifty years and has never once been filled.

There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is the choice to be alone. Loneliness is the ache of being alone when you don’t want to be. I spent most of my life calling my loneliness solitude, the way you’d call a wound a scar because scars sound like they’ve healed.

The pillion knows the difference. The pillion is the evidence. It sits behind me on every ride, factory-new, waiting for a weight that hasn’t arrived, and it doesn’t care what I call it. It’s just empty.

In A Bench on the Moon, the empty pillion becomes one of the book’s recurring images — alongside an empty chair at a kitchen table and a bench built for two on the surface of the moon. They’re all the same thing: spaces made for two people, occupied by one. The motorcycle version just happens to travel at seventy miles an hour, which makes the emptiness harder to sit with. At speed, you can almost forget the seat behind you is empty. Almost.

I wrote the book because I couldn’t forget anymore. The pillion is still empty. But the bench has room.