A few months ago I gave away my old bicycle, a blue mountain bike that I'd had since I was fifteen. I'm twenty-six now and work as a data analyst in Shanghai.
I gave it to a boy called Wei, who's the son of the woman who cleans the stairs in our apartment building. He'd just started secondary school, and his mother mentioned that his school was quite far away and the bus was crowded and expensive. She'd been looking for a cheap second-hand bike for him.
I no longer needed it for a couple of reasons. When I was at school and university, I cycled everywhere, but since I started working, I've used the metro for my commute, and at weekends I usually rent one of the shared bikes on the street with an app. So my own bike had just been sitting on the balcony for about three years, gathering dust, with flat tyres.
Letting it go was more emotional than I expected. That bike had been on so many adventures. I rode it to my university entrance exam, and my friends and I once cycled it all the way to a lake outside the city. When I took it downstairs, I actually felt a bit sad, as if I was saying goodbye to my teenage years. But that feeling disappeared when I saw Wei's face. I'd paid to have it repaired, with new tyres and brakes, and he was so excited he rode it round the car park about twenty times. Now I see him cycling to school every morning, and it makes me much happier than it ever did sitting on my balcony.