Desire

[rejectomorph]

The early morning phenomenon I noticed a few days ago was back today. It must be a feature of the current unusual weather pattern. This time, there didn't appear to be any fog involved, though. The ridge was covered with heavy, low clouds, and then there was a thin strip of clear sky across the southern and southeastern horizon. Beyond this, the mountains and valley were covered with more thick clouds. As I watched the patch of clear sky, it seemed to ripple with blue-gold light, and I could easily imagine that I was looking down on a broad bay, glowing with morning light, and mountainous headlands rising beyond it.

So captivating was this illusion, that I found myself wishing it to be a real place. It reminded me of those intensely romantic illustrations from the late nineteenth century. My house suddenly felt terribly inadequate to its setting (which it is, in fact, as are all the houses here, but the illusion made it seem even more so than usual), and I imagined myself on the terrace of a simple white villa, overlooking a formal garden that blended into woods and fields and a swath of vineyards and orchards dotted with other white houses. The pines I didn't have to change.

I would have liked to walk in that envisioned landscape, and then go down to that bay and sail across it to explore the dark, mysterious headlands of the further side as they slowly emerged into morning and afternoon, to listen its to brooks tumble and watch its birds fly, and sit on one of its shaded hillsides to look back and see this place as my imagination had transformed it, small with distance, a perfect miniature world, and no illusion.

Comments

[blue-by-you.livejournal.com]

You have a romantic soul.

[rejectomorph]

I'd hate to lose my grip on unreality.

[marseille.livejournal.com]

I'm sitting by the window and the sun is so bright that things reflected in the window appear to be different than they are. The color from a nearby flowerpot fills in the cut-out of a teal lampshade only in the reflection. The green of the window shade and its slatted pattern colors in the underside of the nearby porch ceiling. Nothing as beautiful as what you see in the fog, but startling.

[rejectomorph]

Things are often most interesting when they seem what they're not.