I had made a promise to my smaller self,

my more honest self,

that I wouldn’t loose touch with the secret world that lives inside the Bouffelaure garden. That in stepping in the fields of lavender, or laying under the tomato plants, or tracing the veins of the zucchini flowers

that I would remember the feeling, like jumping off a cliff,

the weightlessness of my world. How days could pass, how summers passed, and I hadn’t talked to more than my grandfather, the horses, and the fig trees. It’s hard to remember now, how simply one sunset bled into another. It’s hard to remember now, the consistency of contentment.

I had forgotten, for a moment, that light.