The trail starts narrow and stays narrow. Stone underfoot, loose in places, the kind that makes you look down whether you want to or not. And when you look down you see it. The Tyrrhenian, flat and metallic, so far below it doesn't seem real. More like a photograph someone left on the floor of the world.
Wild fennel everywhere. You brush against it and the smell stays on your arms for the next kilometer. Broom too, those yellow clusters that lean into the cliff like they're daring gravity. I stopped to load a new roll and a goat appeared on the slope above me, chewing, completely unbothered. It watched me fumble with the canister. I watched it not care. Fair enough.
At this hour the coast is still waking up. Positano is a pale smudge to the west, too distant to hear. No boats yet, no voices carrying up from the water. Just my breathing, the dry scratch of my shoes on the path, and somewhere below, a church bell. One single note that floated up and dissolved before I could count it. My father grew up two hours north of here and he always said the south moves slower because the beauty is heavier. I used to roll my eyes. Now I'm standing on a cliff at nine in the morning, unable to take a step forward because the light on the water just shifted, and I think maybe he was right.
The camera sees it differently than I do. It flattens the height, loses the vertigo. It can't capture the way my chest feels tight and open at the same time, or the fennel, or the fact that the air up here tastes like salt and dry stone and something sweet I can't name. But I take the frame anyway. The sea, the broom, the goat. Che vuoi. Some mornings you just point the lens at the obvious thing and trust it.
