The story:
There is a path by the river not far from my home that I’ve walked countless times. That morning, it felt unfamiliar, as if someone had moved it somewhere else during the night. The trees stood like shadows behind a milky veil, and the Widawa wound lazily through the landscape like something only half remembered.
I always take my camera with me now, almost out of habit. At first, I didn’t even know what I was looking for. And then the light began to change. It wasn’t sudden, more like a gentle warming of the mist, as if someone had breathed color into it. The sun hadn’t fully risen yet, but it was already there, hidden, diffused turning the fog into a soft, luminous glow. The river received that light calmly, reflecting a blurred, drifting, delicately golden ribbon.
I stood still longer than usual. There were no birds, no wind. I had the feeling I had stumbled into a place I wasn’t meant to disturb. It was the quiet pulse of morning.
Taking the photograph felt like breaking a spell. The heavy mirror of my camera in my hands, I tried to hold onto that strange, suspended moment between the slowly retreating night and the birth of day one frame, then another. I stood there with the sense that if I came back even ten minutes later, everything would be gone, as if it had never existed.
The fog began to lift when I finally turned toward home. And by the time I reached the door, the world had already awakened.
“Quiet Glow” no longer existed.
Widawa river, Wroclaw, Poland
© Michał Mierzejewski
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