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Leaving What You Love Will Make You Love It More
I should be good at leaving places behind.
I do it often enough. Some places look their best in the rearview mirror, receding as rapidly from memory as from view.
But I like it here, in Juan les Pins. Even in the winter, with the sea cold and murky and the shutters pulled down in front of the stores. Maybe especially in the winter. There’s a melancholy glow that haunts a seaside town when the tourists are all gone. My mother taught for a while at the school I attended, and when classes were over, I’d stay behind, after the other kids had gone home, and wait for her to finish work. The empty corridors felt the same way the boardwalk does in winter.
And it’s just so beautiful. As beautiful as any place I’ve lived in a life stalked by beauty. The distant mountains seeming to bloom larger under a sky turning steadily pink. The sun sending up one last dying flame to shine in the windows of a silent minaret. The constant murmur of the sea at my side, running short of breath as it stumbles on the sand. It’s that sky, the same light that bewitched Picasso and Monet, blue as mother’s eyes in the afternoon, fragile pale rose when the sun begins to sink, that I’m trying to steal with a clumsy pen.
