Tell me life is beautiful

I watch this Riviera landscape change character through the day in a seamless, long overdue therapy session: the pale, phosphoric sunlight in the morning, reflections scattered like sequins across the ocean in the afternoon and later the dense, quiet darkness.

He envies me for being calm and it's true, for the first time in months I breathe without the sense of a lingering fear burning somewhere deep inside my lungs. "We're all waiting for something", I reply.

Mother had a psychiatrist talk to me once, a few weeks after my father had died, I'm guessing he was paid to openly declare that "she seems just fine". Sometimes I wonder who I would be if he hadn't, so I ask Henry as he sits down next to me. Champagne colored cocktail in hand, his sun bleached hair a perfect mess. "It's one of life's great mysteries" he says, "like why grown ups choose to wear rompers".