Some days you leave the house because you have somewhere to be.
An appointment.
A job.
A woman who will probably make an already complicated life even more of a mess.
And then there are days when you leave simply because you no longer want to stay where you are.
That was one of those days.
I had no plans, no schedule, no one to meet. No mystical revelation penciled into the calendar. Just a camera, a comfortable pair of shoes, and the vague hope that, for a few hours, the world might stop asking me questions.
Sometimes carrying a camera is only an alibi.
A man walking alone with no destination looks lost.
Put a camera in his hands and suddenly he becomes an artist.
It is remarkable what a piece of black plastic can do for a human being’s reputation.
So I walked.
Without looking for anything in particular.
The lake sat there, immense and still, wearing the expression of an old sage who knows every answer but enjoys watching you screw up far too much to reveal even one.
That day, though, the water had receded.
It had exposed what it usually kept hidden: stones, fissures, white slabs worn down by time, small pools trapped among the rocks.
It looked as though even the lake had gotten sick of staying in its place.
It had stepped aside.
Pulled back its body and let us walk across its scars.
People moved slowly over that temporary land. Couples, families, children, dogs, men with their hands in their pockets, and women looking for the best angle from which to photograph something that had not existed the day before.
We walked where fish usually swam.
And that alone was enough to make us all feel a little lighter.
Human beings have a weakness for places they are not supposed to be. We enter abandoned buildings, fall in love with the wrong people, and when a lake withdraws, we rush out to walk on its bed.
Maybe freedom is this too.
Setting foot, if only once, where the world had planned for nothing but water.
There was no hurry.
No one seemed to have anything truly urgent to do. And if they did, they had the good sense to forget it for an afternoon.
A couple walked in the distance, close enough to share the silence and far enough apart not to trip over each other’s thoughts.
A man followed his dog.
Some children leaped among the rocks as though the landscape had been prepared especially for them overnight.
Farther on, a swan glided through the clear water with the irritating elegance of someone who has never had to explain to anyone what they intend to do with their life.
I took pictures.
Not because I had something to say.
Not yet.
I photographed because the light fell well. Because the lake bed looked like the wrinkled skin of a sleeping animal. Because some days do not ask to be understood; they ask only that someone notice them.
And that day, I had noticed.
That was all.
In the distance stood walls, towers, and old stones that had survived wars, loves, betrayals, tourists, and probably a few especially creative municipal administrations.
But I did not feel like thinking about history.
History is heavy.
It is full of illustrious dead men, dates to remember, and men convinced that building a tower was an excellent way to become immortal.
I wanted only the present.
That small, insignificant present made of shallow water, pale stones, and people strolling without knowing they had ended up in a stranger’s photographs.
For once, I did not need the landscape to mean something.
It did not have to represent loneliness.
It did not have to speak of people who leave, missed chances, or that exquisite collection of disasters we call experience.
It was beautiful.
And being beautiful was already enough.
We have this terrible habit of asking beauty to save us.
We look at a sunset and demand an answer. We leave on a journey hoping to come back changed. We photograph the sea, the mountains, and distant cities as if somewhere beyond the horizon an employee of the universe were waiting to hand us the instruction manual we misplaced at birth.
But beauty saves no one.
It does not pay the bills.
It does not repair relationships.
It does not make the call for us when we are too proud or too afraid to do it ourselves.
Beauty does something much simpler.
For a few minutes, it shuts us up.
And perhaps I needed that.
I needed to stop arguing with my own head. To stop analyzing everything as though somewhere there were a culprit to be found. To let my thoughts fend for themselves, those spoiled little bastards.
I had other things to do.
I had to walk.
I had to look.
I had to breathe without turning that into a long-term project too.
The afternoon slipped away with the discretion of things that go right.
The light changed slowly. The white rocks turned gold, the people became silhouettes, and the lake began reclaiming the scene.
A boat crossed the water.
A young woman raised her phone toward the sunset, searching for her face inside that light.
Maybe she would send the picture to someone.
Maybe she would post it to prove to the world that she was living a magnificent life.
Or maybe she only wanted to remember that, on that day at least, she had been there.
There was not much difference.
Deep down, we were all doing the same thing.
She with her phone.
Me with my camera.
The others standing still before the sun.
We were trying to gather proof.
Not that we had been happy.
Happiness is too large a word for one afternoon.
Proof that, for a few hours, we had managed not to be unhappy.
Which may be the most honest version of having no cares.
It does not mean having no problems.
It means letting them wait.
Sitting them down somewhere with no water and no cookies and saying, “Behave yourselves. I’ll be back later.”
And they will come knocking again, of course.
Problems have a constancy lovers can only dream of.
But meanwhile, the sun was sinking.
The flags moved in the wind.
Birds crossed the sky without worrying about making the moment memorable.
And for once, I did not feel the need to improve it either.
It was all already there.
The light.
The water.
The people.
The quiet sound of the world continuing to exist without asking for my contribution.
When the sun touched the horizon, no one received an answer.
No life abruptly changed direction.
No god came down from the sky to explain where we had gone wrong.
The sun simply set.
With the professionalism of something that has been doing the job for billions of years and does not need applause from a crowd of assholes armed with smartphones.
I went home more or less the same as when I had left.
And that was the best part.
I had not been reborn.
I had not defeated my demons.
I had not found the meaning of life hidden under a rock by the shore.
I merely had dirty shoes, a memory card full of photographs, and a little more silence inside my head.
Sometimes that is enough.
Maybe freedom from care is not a permanent condition.
Maybe it is not even happiness.
It is a truce.
An afternoon when you stop demanding something from life and life, surprised by your sudden good manners, stops demanding something from you for a while.
Sooner or later, the lake would reclaim its space.
The water would cover those stones again.
The footprints would disappear, and no one would know where we had walked.
But the photographs would remain.
Not to prove that I had discovered an extraordinary place.
Not to tell the story of some great adventure.
Only to remind me that one day I left home without knowing where to go and, for a few hours, had no need to arrive anywhere.
The world had minded its own fucking business.
And finally, so had I.
