#Monomad Challenge - Até ao fim do mundo

Good evening, #Monomad friends

Here is my entry for the #monomad contest by Hive account@brumest and Hive account@monochromes.

To the End of the World

This phrase is inscribed on the memorial located in front of the Alcobaça Monastery.

That day was particularly happy. At the time, I was still in a relationship. It didn’t last much longer, but I thought I had found “the love of my life.” The innocence of youth doesn’t always come with the necessary wisdom and foresight. And one’s vision is clouded by matters of the heart, not always allowing one to see things clearly, with even a modicum of reality.

Good times—that’s undeniable. And I wouldn’t do anything differently. Life is meant to be lived. Of course, there are regrets, but doing something differently would only put us in a different position than the one we’re in today, and it wouldn’t necessarily mean the path would be simpler, easier, or better, or that we’d have had the experiences we’ve had, or met the people we’ve met.

There’s a saying that we shouldn’t return to places where we were once happy. But I honestly don’t believe that. What we shouldn’t do is revisit those places expecting to have the same experiences, or to feel the same emotions, or to feel the same way we did the first time. Photography allows us, in an immediate way, to travel faster and more precisely to certain moments and times in life that we might not have been recalling in such detail, but suddenly, there are details, colors, or shadows, and even the clothes we wore on that occasion that make our neural connections reignite and remind us why that moment, or that time, was so special.

At the Monastery of Alcobaça, marked by a tragic love story between Pedro and Inês, it also came to be, for other reasons, a place dear to me.