Bretagne

16 august

There is a beach under running clouds. It have been raining and it will rain again. There is wind and shards of sun that come through. People too, coming through their lifes in the land, arriving to settle in the sand even if for few hours, to be something else, somewhere else. 

On the corner, a woman changes clothes under her pareo. The fabric, on the wind, is a flame. Or perhaps the fire is her, vortex of wind and skin and woman’s hair. 

More towards the half of the beach, a group of youngsters run after each other, and throw themselves in the air and into the sand, turning and circling. The wind brings shouts, laughs. 

The sound is the same than in the shores of Venezuela, 8000 kilometers and 40 years ago. The ones laughing, the flapping of a pareo, the waves. The waves from afar, the sound of silk on your skin from close by. Walk and let the silk caress your elbow, your neck. The sea caress the land, and you hear. Close your eyes now. Is it really Bretagne? Has all this been a dream, a nightmare, both? 

Open your eyes and is still day, and a gannet crosses the sky, closer to the horizon than any other bird you can still see and recognize. The brilliant white wings tipped in the darkest black, like those long gloves of Audrey Hepburn on her pale and beautifully delicate arms. But this flight has no fragility whatsoever, a straight line with more decision and purpose than any of our mechanical toys, our planes, or than any other human for what matters. 

Open your eyes to the night and let the rythm of the lighthouse capture your internal volition. Realize then that we are not much more than that, towers of stone anchored to a shore, signaling to the others that travel, dreaming their travels, trying to loose ourselves from the roots that we ourselves, have grown. Rhythmically.

Smile. It is a beach, in Bretagne. Open your chest and breath in the salt and the life of the sea, the smell of something protean, polymorphic, ultimately un-understandable. Smile again, nobody else gets it neither. Smile to the sun that is coming through, or the drops of the rain that is about to start, that ultimately will drive you away from this beach, back to your life of land-based existence, to your life of cities and cars and computers. Smile, now that you still can. 

It’s holidays, after all.