“When it is hot,” said the man, stripped to his waist, his lean brown body glistening with sweat against the windless air, above the shadowless soil. “Then winter calls to me more than summer does.” He turned his eyes to pass his gaze momentarily across the sun’s sharp trajectory.
“When it is hot,” he continued, “I am withered like a brown blade of grass and I long for days when winter winds cut my face like the last defiant slash of claws from a dying lynx; those days when I wrestle all the heavy snow with boots and high knees to fill the empty pails, and bear the punishing cold like orphaned children on my back.
“I could live and die in such air, it is true, but roots have grounded me here. I have two children of my own, a wonderful wife. The children grow quickly, and we could not leave here now, there is such abundance here. But on days like this – so hot – I look for snow in every evening shadow, for cold wind between every leaf, for frostbite on every sunburn. Tell me, cyclist man, when the sun burns you, do you long for winter too?”
Having stopped at the man’s watermelon stand — where, beside the stand, the watermelon numbered in hundreds neatly piled and interlocking like a castle wall of speckled yellow and green blunted edges — the gypsy cyclist regarded the man quizzically. “Me? Oh no, not at all. I am here where it is hot because I come from a cold climate and long for the heat. I see that you and I are opposites.”
“Opposites?” said the man, a smile turning to soften the hardness of his gaze. “I am not so certain of that. There are extremes, perhaps, of what we may bear of all that is either hot or cold. I may prefer the cold when it is hot and perhaps when it is cold I will prefer the heat, but there are no opposite things under all the stars; they are really just the same.”
“The same?”
“With certainty. I endured the terrible sharpness of the cold for the wife and children I did not have and the mother and father from which I ran. I fought and survived alone with every second of time and meagre snowflake of strength focussed and pitted against all the hardest of winter’s rages, all for the life I dreamed I someday would find.
“I have that life now, I bear it fruitfully and with immense responsibility and beautiful sacrifice. And when the hot air shimmers in waves and my sons’ sillouettes seem to spread their bodies thin against the dancing heat, I would fight alone and pit myself against the sun and the cracking earth to feed them and to protect them. But here they are, and we do not worry about our next meal, nor of hungry predators, or fear the darkness of night. And so, for every step that I take beneath the burning sun, I survive and prepare for the life I do not have. And when my children are gone, and my wife has perished in the ocean of whatever illness that must eventually befall either one of us, or both of us, then will every step still be to defy the aching heat or the piercing cold. It will not matter which.
“Perhaps,” sighed the man, “you do not see it that way, cyclist man. But will you still, for your every pedal stroke beneath the hot waterless air or against the cold lashing wind, conclude that you and I are opposites?”
“Well,” said the gypsy cyclist, reaching for a few coins from his jersey pocket. “Perhaps not so much.” The gypsy cyclist paid the man for a few slices of watermelon, and began to devour them. Until then, he had not been aware of the hunger that lashed at his sunken stomach. “Thank you!” he said, mounting his bicycle. “I have a long way to ride today, and it is a scorcher! I will take some watermelon with me for the road.”
The gypsy cyclist shifted his weight, took a drink of water, and turned his handlebars toward the sun.
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