The Pacific frightens me

The Pacific frightens me.

Not the kind of fear that makes you run. The kind that holds you still, eyes open, watching. The waves arrive and you can't tell whether they want to take you away or wash you clean. Maybe both.

The owner of the hotel had warned me. I had gone to her to say I was sleeping strangely, waking in the middle of the night with vivid dreams. She only said: the Pacific.

She was right.

Last night I dreamt of my mother. She died when I was a child. In the dream I couldn't tell whether she was dead or simply absent — in dreams that difference doesn't exist; it's the same thing. There were her suitcases. I opened them and inside were her clothes — the ones she wore when I was small. I still remember the colours. I remember them better than her face, maybe. And then the perfume. Violetta di Parma. That sweet, antique scent no one buys anymore, and which for me is still her, entirely.

I woke up and ran a hot bath with salts I had taken from a five-star hotel a few days earlier. They were complimentary. I carried them off with me. It's something I do — I keep the beautiful pieces of the places I pass through.

Now I'm sitting in front of the ocean with a mask on my face. Tomorrow I move on.

But before I go forward I want to go back. To Palm Desert.

I had never felt sad leaving a place. I'm always leaving — that's what I know how to do. My suitcases are always packed, even in my head. But that morning at the airport I felt something I didn't know how to name.

I made a promise to that place. An exaggerated one, I know — I'll come back by buying a house there. I don't know if it's possible. Maybe this book will be my way.

The desert took me. The mountains. The rocks that don't even look like rocks — they look like something older, something that existed before words. Those colours at dawn, that living orange that burns slowly. As a little girl I used to tell a priest who was my friend that the desert is dry and sharp like a succulent.

Succulents survive on very little water.

Maybe I'm a succulent too — no fixed home, suitcases always behind me, surviving on little and blooming where no one expects.

Then from Palm Desert to here I crossed the forest. Centuries-old trees, impossibly tall, a green so dark it doesn't look real. You feel small. Not in a bad way — in the right way. The kind of small that reminds you that you exist inside something enormous.

The contrast between the desert and the north of California is something I won't forget. Orange and green. Aridity and life.

This journey is teaching me courage. Not other people's courage — mine. The courage to travel alone for work, to question myself every day, to have no net beneath me when I fall.

This is a journey into myself. Of healing. Of rebirth. Without stereotypes, without owing anyone an explanation.

Because I am free.

And freedom, when it's real, frightens you even more than the ocean.