Moments so beautiful they’re shrouded in melancholy

Music: Parsi - Adult Fantasies

Back in September 2025, I took an impromptu solo trip to Majorca. Whilst I was there, I booted up my Nikon Coolpix- a camera I hadn’t used in over a decade - and set myself a simple video project: to record short clips of anything I found beautiful.

This trip took place during a year already shaped by loss. Grief has subtly reorganised how I move through the world, making me more attuned to the bittersweet-ness of impermanence. It is finitude that gives life its vibrancy, yet this is something I still struggle to accept fully. I hold an aching tension for the richness of the ephemeral. This film is an attempt to sit with that contradiction, tracing fleeting moments of beauty that can never be recaptured.

Film felt like the best form to hold this tension. Unlike photography, the medium allows time to slip through the frame. Video doesn’t preserve the moment, but rather acknowledges its passing. In this way, the medium mirrors the emotional terrain I was navigating, where beauty becomes inseparable from loss.

The song accompanying the video, Parsi by Adult Fantasies, feels especially resonant. Its lyrics, alongside the desolate whistling tones of the track, carry a gentle acceptance that time will strip us back and that nothing is spared. As the lyrics suggest, even grand buildings shaped by human power will one day lose their meaning: ‘only rocks remain and towers of silence’. The song holds a landscape emptied of people, much like the places I filmed, which are beautiful, indifferent and enduring. The ‘desert winds blowing over empty houses’ echo the way life continues around grief and how presence dissipates: ‘try your words out loud they will fade to a whisper’. What remains, perhaps, is the acceptance of impermanence through staying present and observing things as they fade into memory.

Travelling alone was an important experience for me. I made no effort to meet anyone on this trip. The absence of conversation left me alone with my perceptions; there was no one to mediate the feelings or soften them with distraction. My emotions of grief, awe, isolation, and gratitude coexisted without hierarchy.

Being alone in a new place felt like a lens to explore and feel the passing of time itself, where my emotions were inseparable from the world around me. I was capturing the everyday in a space that wasn't my own. When something is novel, it’s easier to appreciate it wholly. Experiencing this heightened presence made me realise that I want to relearn how to see my own surroundings with the same childlike awe; to treat them with reverence too, because although familiar, they are just as fleeting.

“These things, that live only in passing, they understand that you praise them.

Fleeting, they look to us, the most fleeting, for help.

They hope that within our invisible hearts we will change them entirely into —

oh endlessly — into us!

Whoever we finally are.”

- Rainer Rilke, Ninth Duino Elegy

This kind of presence feels like a practice. It's something I can access instinctively. Yet, it can easily slip away in a society shaped by constant acceleration and distraction. Remembering how to stay with experience feels like a quiet form of resistance. This spontaneous trip reminded me of that. As beautiful as this remembering is, it is also difficult to reckon with. It confronts you with your own mortality. How bittersweet that reminder can be.

My project took on an even deeper significance on my final evening in Majorca, when Mum called with bad news about Dad. He was in a coma with severe pneumonia. Suddenly, the unfamiliar city that had gifted me presence became frightening. Roaming its streets in a state of panic, unable to understand the languages of passers-by, I felt claustrophobic. I was trapped in an unknown place, alone, with no familiar faces or anchors. I had no choice but to carry on as normally as I could.

The following day, I had booked an all-access tour of the Cathedral of Santa Maria of Palma: a striking Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral, and a place accustomed to holding loss, sheer faith, and uncertainty. I decided to go, though I was unsure whether I needed something gentler.

The religious imagery felt overwhelming during such a critical moment. I sat in the nave, praying for my Dad, when my eyes were drawn upwards to the cathedral’s incredible rose window.

The rose window is one of the largest in the world, and is composed of over 1000 pieces of coloured glass. From the outside, it is a geometric marvel; from inside, the colours are a breathtaking kaleidoscope. The window is illuminated so beautifully when the sun is shining through, only for the natural light to fade and mute the colours. Watching this slow, inevitable change, felt like an important reminder that to be moved by the world is to accept its impermanence. There is a strange tenderness in that acceptance, even when it is cruel and painful. As I sat beneath this magnificent, centuries old rose window, I realised that perhaps this is where reverence begins.

This short film is an attempt to encourage us to listen closely while there is still life to experience, and to honour what passes through us, knowing it cannot stay.