khamsa means “five” in arabic. repeated three times as a protective incantation, it represents the space in which my siblings and i grew up, protected from any evil eye. at home, we speak hebrew, english, and french, having moved to france from israel in 2007. but frankly, we grew up in a bubble. a self-created world, playing games and inventing characters.

the youngest one is sara, fifteen years old. before her is jonathan, seventeen, michael, twenty, nina, twenty-two, and myself, twenty-five years old, l’ainée, the oldest. in-between domestic scenes and portraits of friends, my gaze evolves as my siblings grow up. when i was ten, i promised myself to never forget what it feels like to look at the world as a child: everything is new, imagination blends with reality and the unknown is exciting. coming of age narratives are usually recorded by a parent, but here it is the protective older sister, both participant and observer of this children’s world, striving to embrace those in-between moments.

we grew up outside of traditional schooling, in an alternative educational philosophy called unschooling, which revolves around each child’s needs and desires. my parents’ homemaking approach was to welcome us to the world with love and joy for the first seven years, then let us explore activities and social life until the age of fourteen, before supporting us in a personal project—in my case, photography—as it professionalizes until age twenty-one. without school to distract us, everything fell into place.

a warm and breezy late spring evening, in the garden of an old stone house by a lake. our home in france seems impressively solid from the outside, but the inside is soft and messy. you sink into its bubble, the joys and sorrows that have been lived here gather in your essential being. a sense of belonging transcends a peculiar fusion of serenity and boredom. there is nothing to see, yet everything is beautiful.