Brancaleone Superiore, Calabria
I arrived at sunrise. A red line spread across the Ionian Sea.
Cicadas started. Goats moved through the olive trees below the village.
The houses leaned into each other. Some were ruins. A cat watched me from a broken window, tail flicking. It looked unimpressed. Maybe it recognized me.
I lived on the coast, about five kilometers away, but I kept coming back. Each climb shifted something. The higher I went, the more the rest fell away—traffic, noise, even the sea.
Past the cracked square, a narrow path dropped along the cliff. My breathing grew loud as I climbed the steps to the cave.
Inside was a small church carved from stone. A pillar rose in the center like a tree trunk: the Tree of Life, a powerful religious symbol.
Armenian monks carved it in the 10th century, they said, when Byzantine troops were fighting the Arabs.
Now goat bells echoed off the walls. An old man once told me, amused, “We kept livestock in here.”
The air smelled of damp stone.
Sunlight slid along the wall and caught me in the frame.
