The light is strong and imperative.
It’s unforgiving in its hotness, but somehow it unfurls itself across your cheekbones and presses into the little creases at your elbows and knees.
And you begin to glow internally. The sun illuminates you from the inside.
Cyprus trees surely exist in all the landscapes of paradise. The edges of the sea glisten against the rocks, bright turquoise and translucent navy. Fish and felines drift about in search of gullible humans, and the rain clouds never quite seem to make it over that distant mountain range.
Paradise is the marina of a sleepy fishing village, surrounded by crisp fields of crops and stone churches, and the hardened, varying faces of its inhabitants.
There is paradise in knowing yourself and your own desires more fully.
This place, this light, these stones and people, have brought me a little closer to me.