The ballerina shadow

08/06/2021 Nilson Lattari

The time goes on, and I don’t get my eyes close, meanwhile the long night goes on too. I’m at the window of my room, waiting for the sunrise, looking at the dark alley below. I have a cigarette in my hand. It was the lost light into the darkness and the night was a wave beating on the window overhang, where I put my arms on. My brain, almost sleeping, leads my eyes toward the dark alley between two illuminated streets.
With some stones out of place, the pavement of the alley is illuminated by a lazy moon, beginning her way in the dark sky. The cold and majestic moon dominates everything, and it’s my solitary partner.
But the silence of the alley is broken by shoes sounding, hurried steps, wandering through the empty night.
The light that comes from the right street enhances a feminine figure walking among the sweet and bright moonlight and the shadows of the buildings. My look is lost because those steps seem cheeky and hurried and I wonder where the woman is from, walking alone at that time.
The moon looks at her, like a man, in a jealous way, and turns its light brighter in the alley in black, slowly and anxiously. The feminine figure, at that moment, a simple shadow stretched on the floor is a heaven pencil drawing a poem throughout the wall ahead. Then, she stops and sees herself reflected as she was on a movie screen.
Astonished, I see her get the backpack off her shoulders and put it on the ground. She puts her arms up and starts a dance twisting her body. The curious moon, at the same time, floating above her, moves up its silver illumination as a professional working in a venue.
Her shadow goes on reflected on the wall while her clothes begin to obey her jump in the air, like a ballerina moved by electricity and enchants her public to stand up; or she may be a dancing student seeing herself on a big and inexistent mirror. The shadow simply hears an absent song and makes a crazy spin. I hear little beats that her feet make on the stones while her hands beat together. And I’m enchanted seeing the encounter of hands and feet, and I see my hands sound on their own.
I look around and I’m the unique fan, completely in love. The only observer of that crazy woman showing her art. I can hear the song through her chained steps.
The moon goes up and the shadow gets small slowly, dominated by the dancer. And then, she moves her arms around herself making an incredible tie with her body executing a hallucinated rotation, and ends the dance putting her arms and head up.
She takes her backpack from the ground and puts it on her shoulders. She looks up to the sky and faces the little light of my cigarette, the witness of her show. My applause stands by in the air. I’m afraid to stop the shadow walking.
She disappears in the weak light and I see her for a moment hurrying to the other street like an ordinary woman that is going to her home. My eyes follow her and I’m standing here by the window, in love for her shadow that keeps in my memory waiting for a new dance, waiting for the repetition of her child’s mischief and the remembrance that I will always have of her.