To me and Loic, life seemed easy and free. We traveled the country with people we knew and some we didn't, learning things that maybe we shouldn't have learned. Our friends were almost as wild as my brother and I, running around without supervision. It was the oneness with nature, the permission to be as crazy as you wanted and the feeling of never being alone that made me proud to be who I was: a gypsy.
My mother had grown up with gypsies and we never knew our father's name. Maman told us he wasn't a gypsy but a great explorer nonetheless. She told us he couldn't be with us due to his job and his traveling, which was where our meagre amount of money came from. If I had been older I would have known better. I would have known that the money came from our mother's prostitution and that our father had probably forgotten about us.
Maman died when I was ten and by the time I was thirteen and Loic twelve, we were too wild for our own good. We were closer to animals than humans as we screamed our feelings into the wind with a language only the three of us understood. We were part of the earth now and could feel it coursing through our veins. We desired something we did not recognize, something that came from the very core of our bodies, something that yelled at us with each beat of our hearts. 'Come to me'.
So one day I packed up our few modest belongings and, taking my brother by the hand, we abandoned the gypsy life we knew to run unencumbered through the forests and mountains while transforming into children of the earth.
