From her small window, she sees the man, young, on his bike, carelessly riding the big city, not holding on to the handlebar, and she remembers what it is to be free.
She talks to him. He might be in love with her unresolved, untamed humours, her permanent inner struggles, oscillating between dance and despair. He might love her, she wouldn’t understand why.
"You see, I may be beautiful, but I’m right there, at the edge of the cliff, about to fall. The fall is fast, unlike the climb. It takes so much time to get there, up there in the open sky, with nothing ahead blocking the view anymore - no man, no ambition, no dream. Just the open plan of the world as it is when nothing occults it, when the skin of the eyes, that delicate membrane that touches the air, comes in contact with the vast stripped emptiness of the world.
It is then that you will fall. It’s a calling. The world sucks you in. It is overwhelming, it is bigger than you little mind can conceive, and you see it, there, standing at the end of your youth, the end of your beauty, vulnerable and tired, deep in the carelessness of fatigue, the fatigue of the years, your jaded soul, like a see through curtain that finally shows, finally reveals the world, the glance, le regard.
You are there, about to fall, and it is the most beautiful, most true moment of life, your ugly life, your insignificant life, not because you’ve reached something or somewhere, not because of what you have achieved or become, but because you cannot see this unless you are about to fall, unless the ground can barely grab you anymore, unless there is nothing that can hold you anymore, it is too late, and you know it, so you look ahead, above, with fearlessness and humility, without putting yourself in the equation, the perspective, for the first time of your life, you see its entirety, because you barely exist anymore, you are about to extract yourself from this world and at the same time are about to become it.
This, my young friend, is aging."