This girl, I saw her every day, standing on her balcony all by herself—shiny brown hair to her waist, not too fat, not too thin, but little. Her stillness had me look at her amazed. I always believed her to be admiring the landscape from where she stood. She always seemed to live a life of leisure until one day.

When I saw her face, I saw tears rolling through her beautiful brown eyes down her smooth cheeks to her soft lips painted red. I waited days to get a glimpse of her face again, but this time, I only saw pain behind that beautiful face.

I put all my strength together and took a chance to walk up to her; I had never felt that kind of rush inside me. At first, I was speechless. She looked at me like she could see through me like all my flaws were visible to her and it didn’t bother her. And I knew that moment she had my heart, but the voice in my head said, “Don’t hurt her. She is not the kind of girl you play.” I quickly wanted to ask her, “What was all that crying about the other day on the balcony?”

Even before those words left my mouth, she made me realize that the railings around the balcony were the bars to her cage, and she wanted to be on the other side of it. She spent hours trying to see beyond the cage; there was no landscape, but she was trying to paint her own thing. She was in the midst of discovering herself and what she wants. She was trying to break the invisible lock to her cage.

Never again did I have the courage to face her again. I wanted to woo her and play her like any other girl, but she was different.

Something changed, something within me changed for good, changed my perspective at looking at things, made me sensitive towards other people’s point of view. Everything that we see we know is not what it really is. There are always three sides to everything. Before we give a chance to someone, we should first give it to ourselves, for every person in our life is not a character but a chapter.