Mon Chéri

Neoclassical ambient music for the departures that give no warning.

"Mon Chéri" was a young ram from La Mare aux Loups. In the morning he was well; he still answered to his name, alive among the others in the pasture. By evening he was gone. No sign, no cry, nothing that might have given us time to prepare. For days, though, the heat had been pressing on the meadow, the air thick and suspended, and beneath that deceptive stillness the balance of the living world was already coming undone, silent, invisible. The storm that followed only sealed what the heatwave had begun.

That is the whole cruelty of this wound: a grief that arrives already complete, before it has even found its feet. We were not given the time to be at his side, nor to say goodbye. This piece does not try to mend that, nor to resolve it into something soft and luminous which, in the face of so sudden a death, would ring false. The music simply stays there, beside the emptiness, until a late rain comes at last to wash the grass of the field.

For those who have loved a fragile being, and have watched the living world itself, thrown out of balance, take it back from them without warning.