The Unmarked Ascension, or Easter Monday above Domus de Maria

Welcome Stranger, I'm glad to meet you again, please, sit down with me.
It has been a tiring day, and I'll be resting soon, but your presence inspires me to tell one of many stories from the neverending stream of my thoughts. Not every path is drawn on a map, and not every descent brings back the same soul who climbed, or who heard.

It was Easter Monday — that hollow, quiet day after the world held its breath in the morning. The air was heavy, and nature called, so we answered. No plans. No gears worth mentioning. Just a weathered pair of shoes, a friend, and the restless pull to go somewhere. After half an hour of wandering through tiny towns and old roads, Monte Maria came up in a hushed voice. A solitary group of hills that stares in silence at the sea.

We started late. The sky was gray, that kind of gray that brings storms and doubts. The trail was quickly lost while wandering, no signs — only a neverending dirt road on a slope. The kind of silence that makes you pay attention.

So we rose. At first joking, then quieter, until the sound of wet earth switched to old branches and mossy rocks.

Midway up, the rain came. Not heavy, but steady — like questions you don’t want to answer. We didn’t turn back. Something in the mountain, in the way the cluds moved above the low brush, made retreat feel impossible. We moved slower. More careful. The rock slick, the ground uncertain. One wrong step and the story might’ve ended differently.

But then, just before the ridge, something shifted. The wind cleared. A patch of sky opened like a held breath released. And there — I remember it as clear as this fire now — a single wild flower, pale and trembling, rooted in a crack of stone.

Around it, the valley opened like a revelation. The sea beyond, a soft line between worlds.

You know, stranger… there's a moment before every step off the map, that quiet itch behind the ribs. Not toward beauty, not even toward discovery. But toward risk. Toward the place where you might slip, or get lost, or just... not come back the same.

And something in you says, go anyway. Not because you’re brave. Just because staying safe starts to feel like a slow kind of dying. I’ve felt it before, and I felt it that afternoon — like the mountain itself had whispered: if you’re coming, come willing.

We stood there. Wet and aching. But not afraid anymore. That’s the strange thing about risk — sometimes it strips you bare just enough to see clearly. You begin to notice the little things. The way lichen spreads across the granite. The smell of soaked juniper. The way silence becomes a kind of answer.

Or maybe a quiet companion whose presence, unbeknownst to us, gives us the will to keep ascending.

And when we descended — faster, but still thoughtful — it wasn’t to go home. It was to return. Return to the hands we’d left behind that morning. To the words we hadn’t yet said. To the warmth of people who wait without knowing what you've seen.

So that’s the story, stranger. Not much of an adventure, maybe. But it was unmarked and unexpected as our meeting, and we climbed it anyway.

And something in me never came back down.

Thanks for listening to my story, now it's time for me to sleep.
Farewell stranger

(Don't worry, @alecaltab came back with me, he's safe)