Wild at Heart
The muffler screamed his choice, the wind whipped his eyelashes and the gnats finally tattooed his smile. Was it a departure or a return? He had chosen where and with whom to grow old. Freedom was his final conquest. He stopped the bike, lifted it slowly onto the stand and breathed in the scent of petrol. Then he resumed staring at the landscape. Without that journey he would never have changed, he would never have been who he is today. He would have remained another person: without evolution, without revolution. But every morning, for the rest of his life, when he woke up, he would remember with a relentless pang in his temple, the smell of petrol and endless kisses.
From the unpublished novel YAKAMOZ by Alessandro Bartoli
