The Ceremony of the Bicycle Seat

There is a quiet ceremony performed on empty streets at dusk—
an initiation where one pair of trembling hands teaches another pair to trust the trembling.

You hold the bicycle steady, though nothing about you is steady anymore.
You run behind them, half-anchor, half-shadow, lending balance that you’ll never get back in return.
It’s strange, the intimacy of it—
your breath syncing with their panic,
your footsteps stitching the ground so their wheels may glide.

Every teacher of this ritual knows the secret moment when the spell shifts.
A tiny tilt.
A new rhythm in their legs.
A surprising confidence that wasn’t there when they were clutching your arm like a lifeline.

And then—
your hand leaves the seat.

This is where the poetry gets teeth.

Because the very second your hand lets go,
their memory lets go too.

They shoot forward, not just newly balanced but newly authored.
As if the road opened for them alone.
As if the wind arrived specifically to applaud their brilliance.
As if they were born pedalling.

They do not look back.

Not out of malice—
no, something far more ordinary:
the ease with which humans forget the scaffolding that held them up.

You stay behind, a ghost with sweat on its forehead, holding nothing but the outline of where the bicycle used to be.
The street doesn’t clap for you.
The world does not say your name.
You are simply the invisible angle that made their straight line possible.

And here lies the symbolism people rarely talk about:

Some learn to ride.
Some learn to take flight on borrowed balance.
Some learn to claim the journey as if the hands that steadied them were never there at all.

But you—
you learn a different lesson.
A lesson older than bicycles, older than roads, older than praise:

That some people will ride off with what grew in your palms,
what bruised your knees,
what cost you breath—
and they will not even gift you a backward glance.

And yet—
we keep teaching.
We keep running behind wobbling wheels.
We keep offering balance that won’t be remembered.

Because in some strange cosmic arithmetic,
giving is the only act that leaves a mark
even when the world pretends it doesn’t.