"This is too dangerous.""You're gonna hurt yourself."

"Stop that nonsense before you end up in the hospital, or worse, hurt someone else."

"Get out of here, it's private property."

"Go get a job instead of jumping like a child. You'll end up paralysed."

"You're damaging the wall. It's so disrespectful."

"Did he really do that?"

Can you keep a secret?

You hear a lot of things when you're out in the streets jumping.

Bewilderment, colourful advice and well-meaning insults

But that doesn't stop me - I know that the boys are out tonight.

When I arrive, training has begun.

They leap, chaotic herd of cats jumping from wall to wall, landing on small bars, vaulting over the void. You see four walls and a flight of stairs - they see endless possibilities.

The city is their playground. The streets are where they forge themselves. The concrete rips open their clothes and etches itself in their skin, the holy stigmata turning into silver scars that they show their parents with repentance and their peers with pride.

And they fly, and they twist, and they fall, golden in the dimming sunlight and the certainty that they can outrun death.

The oldest are in their thirties, the youngest have barely learned to walk - youth is insolent and raucous, and it will fly unless you cut its wings. They teach me when I struggle just because that's what it means to be part of them, and others did it for them before. Humility is easy in the face of kindness.

The sweat drips down their bared skin, adorns the tattoos on their backs with beads, the beauty of exertion is a big "fuck you" to anyone who can't dream that bodies cannot move like that.

One of them jumps. It's a perfect arc that overlooks the crowd that is, in that moment, perfectly silent. As one, we hold your breath to see if he will make the jump.

Here, the measure of virility is how much of yourself you give. In this world blood is a badge of honour. The only failed jump is the one you did not dare to make, because fear is the real danger. Fear takes away the risk and the chance to get better. It slowly takes hold of your limbs and weaves its paralytic web around your throat until it closes it up. So they battle it, they toss and turn for the right to keep breathing.

There is respect for those who succeed, because they pay the price of discipline - there is respect for those who fail, because they pay the price of commitment. Commitment to stop being tied down by what is or isn't possible. And they master their mouvements with the precision of highly trained watchmakers.

Risk is a wild animal, a biblical beast that will aim for your throat if you only flinch. Taming it is a miracle that the boys perform daily. It's a strenuous and rewarding prayer that takes the form of spitting in your hands and rubbing them on the soles of your shoes - eliminating dust because they are so sure that their muscles will wrestle the beast.

The silence is broken by a joyful roar - he made the jump.

The danger magnifies it, but it is not what makes the moment sublime - it is what it means to face the danger.!!!!!

And they fight, those golden boys, they fight for the right to keep the hold on that stupid, senseless, childish feeling of the concrete under their feet and the sky at their fingertips.

They fight for it because they can sense it passing through their fingers like sand, every day bringing them closer to the ground so, of course they would want to jump higher.

They are misfits, outcasts and weirdos, the kind who skips school and comes back with a broken arm to work once a month. They lost faith in everything that is not themselves because a lot of them never had a choice. Their cathedral of concrete has heard all their anger and all their frustration in a world that urges them to grow up.

They're a pack of young wolves who outrun freedom on the daily - their light shines so bright because they are desperate to control something and they scare the passerby because they are gods.