Summer reveries

There’s a quiet longing for a place that only lives in my mind, like a memory that hasn’t happened yet. A dream made from the warmth of the sun, the sound of the sea, and the feel of soft sand beneath my feet. This feeling is more real than anything I’ve ever known. I can almost feel the sun on my skin, just the right warmth, like a gentle hug from a place I’ve started to forget since I left home. It’s the constant rhythm of the waves, rolling in, whispering something I barely understand, unlike a song I can’t stop playing in my head. 

The sea calls out to something deep inside of me. The salt in the air and the laughter from the sunlit  backseat of a car, feel like fragments of a dream I keep returning to. I was there once, watching the blue, shimmer from afar, just beyond the highway carrying me home.

It’s not just the place, it’s the feeling of it too. The peacefulness, the openness, the way time seems to stretch and slow down. It’s the kind of stillness where everything feels right, as if the world has paused for a moment, giving me space to breathe, while I’m stuck in an endless summer.

The summer back then felt indeed endless. 

I dream of the deep blue sea.

Somewhere where the sun never sets, where the birds keep flying,  I lay down on the floor on a Sunday afternoon, reminiscing of a past that is long gone, feeling the bittersweet moment that’s surrounding me, waiting for a new life to be born.

I'm back under the small orange tent I once built, wrapped in a blanket despite the warmth of the summer morning. Before me, the mountains stretch out, draped in a green canvas, speckled with the occasional herd of cattle clustered around an old man. 

He sat on the damp earth under the fig tree, his gaze drifting toward the distant Mediterranean, shimmering above the clouds like a scattered trove of jewels. From up here, it looks both distant and endless, a body of water that has carried stories about traders, sailors, dreamers, and exiles alike.

I close my eyes, and for a moment, I am there again, barefoot on the shore, my footprints swallowed by the tide before I can turn back to see them. The salt clings to my skin, the breeze tugs at my hair, and the horizon stretches endlessly drawing a thin line where sky and water meet but never touch. 

The sea is a promise and a memory all at once, a threshold between what was and what could have been.

The old man shifts slightly, his gaze still locked on the shimmering blue below. I wonder if he too, is remembering. Perhaps he once stood on a distant shore, staring at this same sea from the other side, longing for something just out of reach. Or maybe he never left, letting time fold over him like the constant, inevitable and eternal waves.

A gull cries overhead, its wings slicing through the air, weightless and free. I envy it. The way it belongs to neither land nor sea, yet moves effortlessly between the two. If only I could do the same, exist without belonging, drift without being lost.

The wind shifts, carrying the scent of the sun-warmed earth. I pull the blanket tighter around me, not from cold, but from something else, something I can’t quite name. The feeling of being between two worlds, of standing at the edge of something vast and unknowable.

Maybe that’s what the sea has always been to me, a border, a question, an unfinished sentence waiting for an answer I may never find.

Maybe I am the old man now.

Photos from trips to Dinard and Sardegna on film