The vagabond

She was there, not wondering when she was born or who her parents were.
She was there wandering around, without much on her mind.
Without having to think about rent or mortgages or taxes or the morning traffic...

She simply was.
She travelled the world whistling, stopping every now and then to eat.
That was her life.

She spent her days exploring the world, getting around as best she could.
Sometimes she slipped unnoticed into some car, without knowing its
destination: it didn't really matter, the only thing that mattered was
to keep going around, exploring new worlds.

But on that particular day, when we met, an inexplicable
phenomenon had occurred, as it had already happened other times: a strange
invisible obstacle was blocking her way.

It was a terrifying feeling.

Going around like that and then feeling blocked ... by whom or what, she didn't understand.
And it always happened just at the best moment, when maybe she had in front of her
a beautiful, colourful, deep panorama...
a new road to explore, long and luminous.

A place where she could continue her endless journey,
a new destination to reach,
where to start new days of wandering around as a vagabond
and pilfering food wherever possible....
trying not to be noticed...
if it weren't for that habit of whistling she had,
everything would have been simpler: she had often risked being discovered.
But she knew no other way to go on living.

She made an effort to look at the situation from a different angle:
she tried to move slightly, to try again from another point,
but that mysterious force kept resisting.
She stopped for a moment to think, and that was when I saw her, from far away:
I too was on "this side" of that invisible wall,
like her, on the same side of the world.

And she, standing still, kept thinking.

And we spent some time like that: she thinking about that mysterious force,
and I watching her.

At a certain point she became convinced that there was no way around it: she had to give up,
because it is not always possible to go beyond a certain road: sometimes it is chance, or destiny,
that decides for us, placing insurmountable and invisible barriers in front of us, which leave us no choice
but to give up.

For her, that road, that beautiful luminous and unknown depth, would therefore remain there,
forever. Unexplored and unreachable.

And so, she bent slowly on her slender legs,
began to beat her wings, and with a little jolt she rose.
All in a handful of milliseconds.

Now she was moving away, the mosquito, slipping absent-mindedly through a small crack
left open in that window, with the bitter feeling of having left behind her
that fantastic world, not realizing that she had in fact, in the meantime, just entered it.

I stayed in there thinking, watching her go away,
finding myself looking at another me,
who, reflected, was looking at me,
observing me and understanding,
what perhaps I will think I never understood,
while absent-mindedly I have already stumbled,
on the other side of the glass.

12/06/2004, Luis Dragotto.