It was during the winter, a year ago or so. I was visiting my mother at her house in the country as I do once in a while. When the sunday lunch was over, I felt the need to go out for a moment. And so I did. I told her and my brother I wanted to walk a bit but none of them responded positively to my invitation. I could feel the urgent desire to connect with the silence I was missing so much since I had moved to the city two years before. So i grabbed my coat, my camera, and my pack of cigarettes. I passed the door and started my walk towards the alley out my mother's yard.
I always hated my hometown when I used to live there, but now it felt like everything I aspired to : purity, quietness, landscapes.
Serenity.
Every little gesture was more pleasant to be done there than to be done anywhere in the city. I grabbed a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. Not only the air was so cold that it created large and thick volutes of white smoke before me but I could also hear the heat burning the paper in little cracks.
At this moment I realized that I never really hated this little town, I hated to be tied there, I hated it when it was everything in my world and at the same time not enough to fill it. But now, as I had grown free from it, I could finally see its beauty, understand its purpose in my life. From a prison, It had become a shelter.