Hermès – Un jardin à Cythère

Into The Blonde Cloud

I feel warm while I open my eyes, as if something soft yet impalpable is surrounding me, almost hugging me. All around there’s just light, a gentle and blurred light, in a particularly comfortable shade of colour that goes from pink to gold. It looks like I’m in a cloud at sunrise. I feel good. I feel like I’m home, in some way, but I can’t tell why. Back home, my house has nothing to do with this softness, neither inside nor outside. I immediately think about my mother at the kitchen table: she’s reading a book, as she always does, while my father stands outside in our dry green garden, picking up some ripe olives from the tree. ‘Hi. darling’, she says without glancing up from the pages. ‘Would you like something to eat? An orange, maybe? They smell awesomely juicy beyond your imagination’. My heart is full right now. The light is everywhere, I can’t see anything else more specific, but it doesn’t scare me. In this moment, I couldn’t care less to see someone or something else here.I decide to take a walk, no directions to follow, no purposes, just to feel my body moving. I must be weightless as a feather, because my steps don’t leave any marks on the ground. If there’s one at all. Everything looks the same, so I’m not sure where the walls are and when the ceiling begins. Suddenly, I think I hear something. Yes! It’s the call of the seagulls chatting in the distance, flying over the blue expanse of the sea. In the end, I guess this place has more in common with my home then I noticed at first. I’m back in the island where I grew up and from which I left for the city. Or from which I fled, to be fair. But I’m not mad to be here again. On the contrary, I’m glad. With all my wandering around the world, I’ve never felt more at home than in this light.