Premiers Murmures de Saint Cloud
“The changes we make in life often happen when we have a degree of certainty. However, the pain of our past failures and the fears of our peers often fuel our uncertainty. This inability to predict the future is why people find themselves stuck and unable to move forward. They don’t want to feel the emotions of failure. They prefer to talk themselves into settling for an “okay” life, rather than the life they really want. However, failure is a matter of perspective! Is it not failure when you don’t take a chance on the one thing you need? There is no happiness in regret, staying safe or settling for anything less than what you can have through action.”
I arrived in Saint-Cloud on a warm, golden afternoon. The light stretched long across the gardens, dust settling in the air like something out of a dream. I walked around the side of the tall, white house to the back garden and stepped into what felt like the opening scene of a quiet, coming-of-age film. Two boys, their laughter tumbling through the air, splashed in the swimming pool at the centre of a green, hedge-framed world. The water caught the sun like glass.
My room is quiet, white, uncluttered—a little pocket of familiarity in a place that is still settling into feeling like home. The first night, I stood in front of the empty shelves, carefully unpacking my suitcase, placing pieces of my life into this new space. I have already learned that less truly is more.
Now, as I sit by the desk, I take in the few things I brought with me—two rolls of camera film, a bottle of perfume, and a handful of photographs from home. Two of them are of my mum and dad as teenagers, frozen in time, young and full of something I can’t quite name but feel deeply in my chest.
Mornings are still and peaceful here. I wake early, dress in the hush of an empty house, moving slowly through this unfamiliar rhythm that is starting to shape itself into something known. On the desk by the window, a large blue map of the world stretches out before me. When I feel the quiet ache of homesickness, I trace my finger from France to Australia, following the curve of the ocean, whispering to myself, See? It’s not so far, not really.
The two long-haul flights I took to get here already feel distant, like something I watched happen to another version of myself. I feel changed in ways so subtle I can’t quite put them into words—warmer from the lingering summer sun, braver in ways that only come with stepping into the unknown. I am learning when to pause, when to breathe deeply, when to let go of the small things before they settle too heavily in my mind.
I sit here and trace my fingers over names on the map, following blue and red contour lines over mountains and coastlines. There is still so much. The part of me that feels impossibly young—curious, a little uncertain, not yet convinced that I know how to face this unfamiliarity alone—glows quietly at the thought of it all.
There is a quote by John Muir that says, The world is big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
I think I have always been someone who feels deeply attached yet equally restless. My heart holds so much—people, places, homes, moments—and I clutch onto them so tightly it aches. But I am learning. Learning that love and adventure can exist together, that I can miss what I’ve left behind while still making space for the new, for this home that is unfolding around me now.
I have never truly lost anything. I have only gathered—a collection of small, vivid lives lived in different chapters. Street names, window views, gardens, schools, friends, new ways to walk home.
I have done this before. And somehow, I always knew that by the time I was twenty, or twenty-one, I would want to do it again. And so I did.
I feel soulful and old but light and young at the same time. That is what love and adventure give you.
You don’t always know what you have until it is no longer right in front of you, but life has a way of taking care of you. Of filling the gaps, of offering something beautiful and unexpected in return. And all you have to do is trust in that.
It has only been a few weeks—just a moment, really—and the sun is still high in a clear, cloudless sky. I think I’ll go sit outside now, before I let myself get too sentimental.
Until later x