The story:
I didn’t plan to find that moment – those are always the best ones, aren’t they? Just before dusk, somewhere along the forgotten edges of the Mediterranean, I stumbled upon it. An ancient tangle of tree roots, gnarled and bare, lying upside down in the still, shallow waters like the skeletal remains of some sunken creature. The sea was barely breathing. I had set up my camera for a long exposure, craving stillness, not knowing how much silence I was about to capture. The water stretched out like silk, smoothed by time and tide, the mist clinging to the air as if the moon had exhaled and refused to inhale again.
That fullmoon, blurred, and veiled in mist – hung low and ghostly, like a secret watcher. It didn’t shine so much as glow from within, diffused by the thick marine haze. It gave everything a dreamlike hush, that strange pause where the world doesn’t move but feels alive in some other way. The roots were what held me. Twisted, weathered wood reaching out like fingers, as if the tree had been pulled from the earth and turned inside out. I imagined it once stood tall, proud on some forested hillside. Now, flipped and cast into saltwater, it had become something else entirely – an artwork born of erosion, of storms and surrender.
I crouched there in the damp sand, watching the exposure tick down, seconds turning into soft eternity. The long shutter caught it all: the moon’s faint halo, the mist blurring the horizon into oblivion, the surreal quiet of the sea swallowing time. And those roots, defiant in their decay – looked as though they belonged there, half dream, half memory. It wasn’t just a photograph. It was a portrait of what remains when the world forgets, and nature starts to remember in her own language.
And I was just lucky enough to listen.
Tuscany, Italy
© Michał Mierzejewski
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