Her name is Reluctance. She’s of a certain age and lives alone in a farmhouse by the edge of a double railroad track. In winter, she sometimes presses her face against the frozen window and watches the trains roar by just two meters away—endless, deafening.

It’s an endless clatter of metal and people, fragments of cities moving to other cities with leaden suitcases. Curtains drawn or left open, windows and plastic, inspectors and nervousness — and always that same taste of iron in the mouth.

With summer, the train becomes something else: the strong man keeping time on the scorching tracks, the consoling friend with a deep, masculine voice, the beast hunting in the night. In this season her rose, sheltered by the tuff wall, bursts into large double blooms edged in cream. Even in mid-August, when the weather shifts, they remain almost white and as fresh as if newly opened.

Outside, a cool wind lifts her hair, a gift from the sky, a sweet relief from the heat trapped inside the house despite all the windows flung wide open. She closes her eyes, lets her robe fall open, and allows the breeze to dry her damp skin. She slips her arm into the rosebush to reach the hidden faucet, fills a bottle—and suddenly, the rose speaks.

It tells her that once, she would have feared this wind. But not anymore. She isn’t afraid now. Regrets only come when you don’t explore life, when illness comes and you ask, why me? and begin that lopsided battle with doctors—a war you can’t win unless you change who you are, what you feel, and the eyes you use to see the world.

The rose She says dying isn’t unfair — it’s an essential part of life. It can even be beautiful and moving. What is terrible isn’t death itself, but the way we resist it, trying to manipulate fate and cling at all costs, losing all dignity.

The rose says we learn by watching animals, by being trees, by breathing with the wind and sea, by being deeply woven into everything and everyone. And she has taken the hard road: no shortcuts, no easy answers, often desperate, strict, severe. But looking from the outside, all she sees is Cassandra, pointing frantically at the abyss while a sea of crazed lemmings throws itself in.

She wonders, why can’t I be like a tree? Growing older only to become more majestic, and when the end comes, ivy wraps around me until suddenly I fall—stripped, shattered, embraced by moss and carved by insects, yet still sovereign in my dignity. Instead, I’m trapped in a body that loosens, uglies, while inside I am unchanged, longing to shed this faded skin and claim my right to leave.

Old man, I understand you—on that last day of July, when you threw yourself onto the tracks and died.