I was walking, like every afternoon, for a while by the river when, suddenly, I heard the sound of a bicycle bell behind me. Without turning, almost instinctively, I turned out of the way. A smiling girl pedaled past. She was wearing a white T-shirt and a gathered skirt
I followed her gaze as she became small in my eyes until, when turning in the curve of the mill, I stopped seeing her completely. Then, immediately, I heard the brutal sound of irons striking the ground. I did not think. I ran towards the curve and, when taking it, my surprise was that there was no one there
I was alone. I looked at the trail, which was moving forward, and saw nothing. I tried to calculate how long it was to see if, in the short time it took me to get there, the girl had been able to get around. It was impossible. The accounts did not come out. The only reality was that, as far as I could see, there was nothing
For an instant I began to doubt my senses. I had, like inside my guts, a complex sensation to understand, so unpleasant that, without thinking, I decided that the girl was there, face down on the road, next to her broken bicycle
I could barely see her face, not even when he sat up a little, just enough to sit on the floor and hug her right leg. I thought I heard a silent cry from his mouth
I bent down to help her, put my hand on her leg, almost without realizing what she was doing. Threads of blood poured from his bruised knee, running down his skin almost to his ankles.
Then something startled me, just a whisper, something that was simply saying to my ear that it must stop
I separated from the girl. I stopped feeling the heat in my palm. It was only a second, I needed to sit up, take a breath, but then, in a clumsy blink, I lost her
It seemed impossible to me. On the road, there was only one row of ants moving towards a dead grasshopper. Then the strange idea of having lost her forever began to martyr me
I had to sit down. I closed my eyes, to be able to recover his image in my memory; at first they were just disjointed fragments; her hands, her legs, and so on until I recomposed my memories into a single, clear, global figure of hers. I thought, just like that, I could let her go forever...
