Filed under: Uncategorized
We are a generation of diet cokes and dirty mouths. Of uncensored complaints and bleached blonde hearts.
We are a generation of gossip girls and american idols, emulating the gorgeous dirt we suck off our TVs. Choosing our favorite characters and playing the part to perfection, falling in love and breaking promises and tuning in every Tuesday night for more rules to live by, more excuses to stab our best friends in the back and whisper when the doors are closed. We hurt each other because that’s what we know- thats glamour baby, it’s drama, it’s life. Do we know any other way? Should we stay blissfully ignorant? Where is the line between reality and reality tv? It seems so blurry these days, I am living in a soap opera and the channel changer is hidden under abandoned shopping bags and too tight jeans.
I wish I could turn it off.
I wish I could rewind.
Go back to a time when we were happy, together, sitting at the same table and playing Personality Probe after dinner. Laughing when you burped and crucifying your bulky Bill Cosby sweaters. I wish I could rewind to the episodes where we shared the same bed, laughed until we fell asleep, when I could come to you and you could confide in me and we were two against the world. Taking it on with the same blue eyes and soft lips. Battling the drama with a vengeance and giggling all our tears away when the dust settled and our family was broken. I giggle alone now.
But there is no rewind. Our generation will be left to save ourselves, open our eyes and choose to be different or swim inside our blurry lines and remain the same. Live with tainted happiness and strive for some artificial form of perfection.
I’m opening my eyes, and opening my heart. All these petty judgements mean nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. All this gossip is juicy but I’ll leave it for the TV. And I will love you, love you, love you when you think you can’t be loved. I will shelter all your secrets and cherish them like they were my own sins. I will hold my generation until we are whole again.
I know I haven’t told you
but I miss you.
I’ve been holding back memories and sucking down sadness and trying not to flinch when I open my hard cover book and see your perfect marilyn monroe smirk grinning back at me. I have been filling my days with photos and my nights with Diet Cokes and box sets of all our favorite shows, filling my mind with Photoshop Tutorials and checklists and butterflies. Anything to fill the void that I finally felt as I drove down the highway alone tonight. The sun was streaming through my open windows and the old man in the SUV next to me shields his eyes and something in me snaps while Taylor Swift sings the second chorus of your favorite song. Something in me aches to hear you singing next to me. Filling up my car with your presence and your life and your 16 year old worries and fears and sweet, sweet sarcasm. In that moment, I become aware that the seat next to me is empty. Littered with gum wrappers and empty shopping bags and broken aviators.
Seeing that seat shattered me.
You should be there. You should be here. I need you and miss you and I don’t know how to tell you without scaring you away. I want to hold you and cry. and cry. and cry on your shoulder. I am older and blonder and louder. I am cruder and ruder and uncensored to a fault. I am everything you despise and everything you love, the perfect compliment to your soft spoken self. I am the big sister who wanted to be your best friend. who wanted to be your hero. who wanted to be a part of your world so desperately she somehow pushed you away. I spend nights sleeping in your bed, the bed we used to lie in on summer nights and talk about the world and our family and our imperfections and insecurities. The bed that has heard a million secrets. I spend nights here because I don’t feel so alone. The ghost of our laughter sings me to sleep and haunts me when I wake and my feet are cold and your not there to help me cook a healthy breakfast, or listen to me whine at the gym, or sneak in one more episode of Gossip Girl before the world starts turning and we have to be responsible again.
I can’t turn this sadness into poetry because it hurts too much. I am sorry. I am so sorry. I’m sorry if I hurt you, if I ever somehow made you believe you were less than beautiful. Less that extraordinary. Less that perfect and unique and capable of setting the world on fire with all your brilliance. You and your blue eyes and your straight A’s and your squishy nose. I want to hold you in my arms and beg you to forgive me. I want to hold your hand and walk you through high school because when your 16 your universe explodes and nothing is ever the same again. I want to hear all about your first kiss, shield you from a broken heart, shop for your prom dress. I want to be the one you come to when your tired of being perfect, I want to rock you back and forth until you realize that even when you’re a mess, you are wonderful.
And I won’t push you, and I won’t beg you, but when you need me darling
I’ll be here.
Waiting.
Filed under: living my life
Last night the sky turned yellow while I drank a twelve pack of diet AW rootbeer alone. Watching lifetime movies about dead models who inspired the camera and refused to sit still. Rebellious beauties who shook up the world simply by moving their bodies and spiking their hair. One day maybe there will be a lifetime movie about me. But just in case, I’ll leave these words behind.
School is about to start up again and my world is filled with flashbacks of last year. When my hair was long and so was yours. When we covered our pink dorm room in a sea of hot pink and high school memories in cheap Ikea frames. When I wondered if college would change us, if change would break us. Now I know that nothing can. Every time I walk outside our initials are carved into the bark of my favorite old oak tree, as permanent as tattoos. As sacred and beautiful as love letters or symphonies. A reminder that the simplest gifts can bring the greatest joy, a reminder that no matter how much things may change, you and I remain constant. I remember long walks to your house on cold winter days. Getting my designer jeans soaked in the snow, breathing deep and feeling my pale cheeks flush pink. I was in a UC wonderland and even when the heat in your old college house went out, we kept eachother warm with tickle fights and a new puppy who has turned into your best friend.
Today I took pictures of a goddess who hates her black hair. She longs for her long blonde locks but her blue eyes are piercing and like everyone else in this world she has no idea how beautiful she is. I dressed her up in my new red jacket and turquiose feather earrings and laughed as she posed in those John Lennon shades you hate so much. Afterwards we got lost in the September heat and sang Taylor Swift until my throat was sore. I know you miss your golden glow but believe me,
black hair never looked so good.
A private number called your phone last night while we were chowing down on white castle goodness and watching infomercials. The voices on the other line screamed and yelled with a drunken fury so pathetic that I couldn’t help but laugh. They called you a slut and a whore and if they think you would let those words define you they have no idea how strong you are. They tried to cut you down and ruin your night and convince you that the summer love you found by the water of a Tennessee lake is false and fading. I couldn’t stand the sound of their words filling up that clean apartment. I couldn’t stand the sound of so much hate filling up a world that is already full of enough tragedies. After standing over an open casket all day I have learned one thing- we are not entitled to tomorrow. We are simply blessed with today. Life is far too short to fill it with meaningless phone calls and degrading insults. It’s too precious to waste on the ones who can’t see how beautiful you are- on the ones who don’t even care enough to try.
You bought a new black shirt from JC Penny that was 50 percent off and chugged a red bull before the visitation. Sunken eyes hidden behind designer sunglasses crowded around the funeral home and I clung to your freckled hand like a life line. Last Sunday night the russian boy who made everyone smile died on his motorcycle. Last Sunday night he took his last breath and this Friday afternoon we are standing over his body and trying to cope with the fact that we will never hear him sing Lil Wayne songs again. I will never make fun of his accent again. Never. Looking at his face I feel my eyes fill with defiant tears. I will not cry because this is not real. That is not him. Our theories will flow a few hours from now while we eat Mccallisters- theories about witness protection programs and fake deaths. We will create a fantasy because it is easier to believe, so much easier to live with than the finality of the cold body in front of us. In our minds you are riding motorcycles in Australia, you are writing secret love letters to your girlfriend from Asia, you are taking shots in every club in Amsterdam. You are anywhere but laying still in a coffin.
But you are. We saw your face- that handsome face that was always smiling, smiling, smiling. You weren’t smiling yesterday. You weren’t you yesterday. There are whispers filling the church, hushed tones trying to recognize the bruised boy lit by candle light. As we walked into the church, and your friends carried you inside, heavy raindrops fell on the heads of all those blondes and brunettes and red heads who adored you so much. My boyfriend grabbed my hand and told me to look at the sky- nothing but sun. Nothing but beautiful, clear August skies overhead. But those raindrops were dripping down my shoulders, and a rainbow was crying in your memory.
So you see, life is too short. Too short for the bull shit. Too short to forget to wear a helmet. Too short to let anger turn you cold. Too short to hold back I-Love-You’s. Too short to deprive yourself of White Castle. Too short to ignore the ones who are dying to open up. Last night I watched my boyfriend try to get to know his friends all over again. I wanted to cry because in one day he has grown so much, in one day those big brown eyes that I love have opened up to a truth far too vital and beautiful to be ignored- that we are not invincible. That our time is limited, and that while we are here there are people who are dying to tell us their stories, to tell us their dreams, to let us fall in love with them. I’m ready to fall in love.
Filed under: living my life
The past few weeks in choppy sentences…
kissed my maroon pontiac goodbye. the one that played those sweet songs while I prayed on some back country road in the hills of Tennessee. Lost and terrified and sipping on my 6th Monster. there was no speed limit but there was a moon so big it filled my blue eyes with white light and wonder. It lit up the fields sorrounding me on both sides, it painted haunted shadows on the wooden walls of abandoned farms that lined the gravel paths me and my Pontiac ventured on together that Friday night. I drove and I sang and the wheels below me were a constant reassurance, they held the promise of reaching my final destination.
They sang me country lullabies about starry nights and hot summer days. 
A total of 10 hours on the road, my first adventure without anyones hand holding mine and promising me it would be okay. I cried and I laughed and I got to know myself in that car. I prayed for the first time in weeks while my hands were on that wheel. I felt God choose the songs streaming out of my radio so that I didn’t break down and give up. And now that car is gone. The G6 that renewed my hope somewhere between Ohio and Norris Lake. It’s sitting in a driveway and wondering where I went, wondering why I took out all those CDs. Why I stripped it of the peace sign necklace around the rearview mirror. Why I’m driving a golden Acura and smiling. I’m sorry, my little Pontiac. I never planned to give you up. No one ever plans on life- it just happens. We will always have Tennessee<3
I am still humming the tunes of Rascal Flats songs in my head. I don’t want to surrender the metallic cowboy boots I wore so confidently that night in the limo with all those beautiful girls but they don’t belong to me so I’ll thank them for not letting me trip on any of the drunken cowboy wanna-bes last Saturday night and place them on your doorstep. I hope they bring you laughter and beautiful pictures to hold onto. We all piled into two limos and toasted to our summer. Our bald headed driver with the squinty eyes and smokers lips laughs with us instead of at us and drives us to a park overlooking the city so that I can snap picture after picture and indulge myself in all the sweet summer love that will fade in a few months. I am on the ground in the grass while a group of the most beautiful people I have ever seen smile and pose and forget the worries that will flood our minds on Monday morning. For that night we were rockstars, we were forever.
I have a special brand of tears for you. They have a personalized taste as they glide down my cheeks and into the cracks of my uncensored lips. They are salty and sweet and explosive. They are bitter with repressed words and adolescent angst that clings to the corners of my mind. For months I had forgotten the taste of those tears. For months I had forgotten the way that they sting, the way that they pierce my eyes- laughing at my resistance to the inevitable breakdown they promise. Crying for you is like riding a bike. I haven’t had my feet on the pedals in so long but the second I begin to move my legs that old familiar feeling washes over me and I am soaring down abandoned streets and hot August sidewalks. I am traveling back to places in time I tried so hard to leave behind because I was terrified they would define me. I was terrified they would cut me off from the happiness I found temporarily in your pride and your smile and the way you put exclamation points at the end of your text messages. I abandoned my past because I wanted so badly to believe in the sweet seduction of a glittering future filled with freedom and trust and log cabin getaways. I would rather be hurt by the truth than be loved for a lie. I can’t put a pen to paper and sign on the dotted line if it means I lose some small piece of self I have managed to shape and mold and fill with color over these 18 years. I can’t use my signature to make promises that will someday destroy us both. Promises that will fill your blue eyes with expectations and my mine with a burning resentment. We will both catch on fire and when that day came we would be burning far too fiercely to be saved. We will burn until the smoke from our fires suffocates the love we tried so hard to rescue. We will burn until there’s nothing left but wind scattered ashes and a piece of paper that meant nothing. I DONT WANT TO BURN. I won’t sign that paper but I will promise to love you. I will promise to try to be a woman you can be proud of. No strings attached. I will promise to forgive. and forgive. and forgive. I will promise to never stop telling my truth because even when it brings pain that pain is REAL, and raw, and authentic. That pain is beauty in disguise. That pain will bring revelations and miracles. After that pain brings the poison tears I know so well. For so long I have been blocked. I put my fingers on the keys and nothing comes. I have lacked inspiration because I have been trying to write something pretty. Something wholesome. Something that will warm hearts instead of awakening my own. Now I know, I find myself in these words. I find my truth in between the run on sentences and typos. I find love. No matter what I write. I find love.
I hope you can find it too <3
Filed under: living my life, love, poetry, realizing reality | Tags: adventure, belief, boyfriend, color, dinner, family, girl, journal, labels, North Carolina, Ohio, poetry, sister, step family, teen, vacation
It’s so easy to let all the magic of early summer suffocate on the rainy humid days. When the air’s so hot you can’t breathe and the only sound is thunder shaking you to the core.
We loaded up the car once again and set off for an escape. It was hard to leave your brown eyed puppy behind but the mountains were waiting for us and I had two cold Monsters waiting for you to push you through our 6 hour journey. Stopping at rest stops to shoot of fireworks into the sunset hills of Tennessee, you looked like a little kid as you watched them rocket off into the sky. Surrounded by tired truckers and itchy grass and hungry misquitos, I have never seen innocence so simple and lovely as in that moment on that 20 year old freckled face I adore so much.
We wanted to escape- but I don’t know what from. Life, maybe. We wanted to slip into the skin of strangers, wear it like it was our own, talk and walk and look older and smarter and richer than we really are. I wanted to have an English accent and carry a vintage leather purse, you wanted to have a fortune 500 company, a Corvette, black cowboy boots, and a blonde girlfriend snapping pictures and laughing at all your jokes. Well, you’ve got two out of four. I’d say you are a pretty lucky guy.
Sunday night you spent an hour cooking me a dream meal. Sizzling steaks and grilling asparagus and secretly calling your mom for advice while I read Stephen King and channel surfed. We sat outside on the porch together, you and I. No loud smokey parties, no crowded dorms or neon clubs or fancy resteraunts with too many forks. Just you and me and the sounds of the North Carolina woods echoing in all directions. The rain stopped just in time for me to set the table, and that calm that comes after the storm engulfed the two of us alone in our private world. Our elite table for two- a reserved spot in the universe only we could access and only we could enjoy. As delicious as the food was, it was the brown eyed boy sitting across from me that made that meal amazing.
The rest of our trip was filled with trips to hippie shops. I dragged you through door after door, into the tiny cramped spaces that smelled of inscense- their counters manned by frizzy read heads with cherries tattooed on their throats and vintage black spectacles, long haired rockers in button up vests, bored looking rebels in low cut tops with big upper arms and pierced eyebrows. Their shopping racks loaded with one-of-a-kind tops and skirts patched together by local artists, long wonder woman necklaces made out of glass, 15 dollar journals created using the covers of old Dr. Seuss books that have been defaced and arted-up by the hands of 3 year olds with pens and stickers and a passion for scribbling. You kept your mouth shut even though the smell of my sanctuaries made your head hurt, even though the hours that passed while my head spun from all the beauty must have felt like an eternity to you. But you make these small sacrifices for your boho-baby because you love her.
I let part of my trip get ruined by rain and resentment and bad vibes that followed me down all the twisted roads of Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, and straight back home. I could have left my bitterness and jelousy and self doubt in those Asheville hills but for some reason they pulsed through my muscles and nestled in a corner of my heart- creating a space filled with dark shades of purple and blue and black. Infecting the joy and passion and love for life I thrive on. I let that beautiful girl make me question myself, question my worth and my place. I let myself forget the way I used to love her. Forget the way I used to know her. Sometimes it’s so much easier to see people in black and white.
But the truth is- people are techni colored. They are a rainbow of heart and soul and emotion. They are Crayola colored beings with hopes and fears and lies and deceptions glistening in metallic magentas and purples and emeralds. They have neon painted secrets and layers and before I fell asleep last night next to my beautiful little sister I reminded myself that sometimes people only want you to see one color. They only want to show the dark shades, the rebellious blacks and browns and navy blues that hide behind the most beautiful face I have ever seen. But somewhere underneath those dark colors, lurking beneath the shading she has shown for so long, there is an ocean of pastels swimming and begging to shine through. There is a light blue and pixie pink and cotton white that has been pushed aside, covered up, almost forgotten and abandoned. I might not be the one to bring out those colors, but someday someone will.
At least I haven’t covered up my own.
Filed under: living my life, love | Tags: family, girl, Glendale, Home, inspire, love, Ohio, peace, poetry, teen
I live in an enchanted town. In high school I resented my ocean eyed-laughing goddess mama for moving to this magical place. Our family was under construction, being put back together on both ends after it unravelled and seemed infinitely broken. Now it is mended and new and I have two sets of hearts to love, and now that the shattered pieces have been swept off the floor I am free to see the wonders that our catastrophes created. I am free to take long walks in the morning with my shaggy hippie dog and breathe. I am free to realize what I was too stubborn and angry and rebellious to witness before- the enchantment that thrives in my new home.
On this blissfully sunny May morning I stopped to talk to a curly haired nun walking a tiny white dog with pink bows on its ears, a frizzy headed girl missing two teethe and riding her bicycle behind a school bus, an old black man with kind eyes and a contagious laugh. Their smiles and words reminded me that this is not a world of lonely people- it a world of connection. A planet filled with dew-drop covered spider webs that glisten and shine and bind us all together- there is no such thing as a stranger. We are all living and breathing and loving and dreaming and it is oh so easy to forget when you are 16 years old and every face in a high school hallway seems condescending and treacherous. It is oh so easy to believe that everyone is an enemy then, as your body changes and your innocence fades and your identity becomes something that needs to be defined by a clique, a name, a certain binding corner of the universe you will never be allowed to step out of again. But I am not 16 anymore, and those walls that high school can create in the adolescent mind fell down this morning as I smiled at these “strangers.” I grew up, by growing down, and accepting and embracing the innocence I so eagerly left behind. Always in a hurry to be “mature,” to wear low cut tops and heavy mascara and go to the parties in the pictures on facebook. Always in a hurry to hide stuffed animals under the bed and kiss a pretty boy. That was high school for me and so many others. Innocence became a dirty word we threw away- we wanted to be worldly, we wanted to be mature, we wanted to be beautiful and dirty and reckless. Oh how I wish I could see the world then as I do now.
Innocence is beautiful. It is something I breathed back into my lungs as I walked through the friendly streets of my 8 am Glendale town. It smelled like lemon poppy seeds and too much sunscreen and homemade bread. It made me smile to myself for the rest of the walk, it filled me with peace of mind and endless possibility. It is not just the colorful humming birds that tap on your window, or the deer that stare you right in the eye, or the friendly squirrels who laugh and giggle as they chase each other up the trees outside my window that make this place magical. It isn’t the winding labriynth my mom created in the back yard, or the charming victorian houses with three chimneys and spiraling vines and stories to tell. And it’s not the gas light lamps that line the streets or the brick convent with it’s symphony of church bells. No, it’s the peace you can find while walking alone down the enchanted streets that make it magical. It’s the inspiration the wind breathes back into fingers that haven’t touched a key board in months. It’s the poetry hiding in the corners of this town that make it something wonderful.
I am not angry or scared, resentful or bitter. I am not in a hurry to grow up or break hearts. I am content, I am blessed. I get to see my dads blue eyes grinning at me from a TV screen, I get to drip sweat onto a blue mat as I push myself to the limit in a window-sorrounded gym with my step mom, I get to do photo shoots and write poetry with a curly haired mother, and taste cooking sent straight from heaven created by the hands of my step dad. I have two families filled with love, an enchanted home, a brown eyed boyfriend who knows all my secrets, and two siblings who can make me laugh harder than anyone I know.
Like I said,
I am blessed.
Filed under: Uncategorized
So much has changed in these few weeks. My long blonde waves have once again been traded for a choppy bob. My terrified hands have gripped the wheel of my grandpas old mercedes and found a comforting peace in the feel of the road flying by beneath me. I am far from the quiet tranquility of Asheville mountains or the thrill of orange corvettes but I am content in my Ohio Oasis that I am creating with every snap of my camera.
Every time I take a picture I fall in love. I have fallen in love with an 80 year old grandmother who talk about her modeling days with a shimmering spark of memory twinkling in her eyes. Fallen in love with a little girl with thin blonde hair who loves to do cartwheels and make sounds like a cat.
I have fallen in love with a soft spoken boy who has giant blue eyes that will break hearts some day, with laughing best friends in sombreros, with a bald businessman who owns a rainbow of ties from his wife, with a brunette beauty from Mexico who loves cold weather and hates her braces, with an Italian two year old whose laugh is contagious, with rambunctious brothers who adore cotton candy ice cream. Every day I find a new passion bubbling up inside of me for a stranger on the other side of my lens, an aching to know the history behind the face that will soon become art. That is why I started LiveinLove Photography. Because when I put my camera down, the face on the other side is no longer a stranger.
