Val d’Orcia

I was driving — I had to pull over.

It didn’t make sense.

Everything I was looking at — the entire landscape — didn’t look or feel real.

I keptd staring.
The longer I looked, the more unreal it became.

My brain was literally trying to tell me this was impossible.
T
hat the landscape wasn’t real,
That something this perfect, this beautiful had to be imagined.

It looked just like a classic Renaissance painting.

I felt like — I was in it.

It wasn’t.
I wasn’t.

It was just there.

And I remember my head actually hurting, trying to process it —
that all of this existed, untouched, not painted, not imagined.

Just a road…
leading nowhere, and everywhere at once.

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