Paper Face

BAD WATERS

2011-04-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

Years have passed, and in that time I've wandered leaving pieces of my innocence behind like bread crumbs. I'm not as quick to believe that everyone is basically honest and that all smiling strangers have good intentions. It took me forever to realize that all those people - the back-handed-complementers, the ones who step briskly in your path just as you're passing, the self-deceivers, the ones that feign deafness just to have you repeat yourself, those who actually care about who you're wearing and how you're wearing it - that they're the ones with the problem. Why did I ever think it was personal? These people surround you like mosquitoes by a summer pond, but there comes a breaking point when they all suddenly disappear. They're there as they always were, but you will find that you've developed a navigation system that simply steers you away from the bad waters where they lurk.

NOTHING LEFT, NOTHING FORGOTTEN

2011-04-04T13:31:00.000-07:00

PC: Eliot Lee Hazel

There is nothing as blindingly heart-breaking and ultimately humbling as the death of someone you love. The unjustifiable sudden absence of your parents, your best friend or your boyfriend. In the press of pain you will finally see, perhaps for the first time, where meaning ends and where it begins. You will no longer be able to avoid seeing, perhaps for the first time, the storm of wasted moments you've brought upon yourself. And you will finally understand the inevitable unfolding tragedy of life. You will not care about the folds in your clothes, or the fall of hair around your face. What does it really matter? Now, as never before, you will dream about nothing but love. And there is nothing that you are not going to miss. The way they said your name, the songs they liked to sing, the shape of their fingernails. Nothing will fade. Instead, every small memory will bear down on your heart. A silent melody of pain to remind you that nothing lasts.

DAISY FIELDS IN HEAVEN

2011-03-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

PC: Tim Barber

You were never long in your goodbyes little cousin. But just this once I wish you could have lingered. If my heart is made of only a few small pieces, you have left it with fewer still. And now the only thing that remains of you lies buried in the clouded corners of my sleep where the past hangs heavy. Remember the way we used to play barefoot in the summer rain, and catch tiny green frogs in a tiny green village by the woods? Remember swimming with smallest silver fish in the coldest river? Remember the daisy field you said was your favorite place in the world, and how it took our rusty bikes half a day to get there? Some memories are the happiest of miseries. I never got to say goodbye. So goodbye little brother. Goodbye. I hope they have daisy fields in heaven.

THE PAINTED VEIL

2011-03-06T14:57:00.000-08:00

PC: Candace Meyer

Simple. Honest. Modest. Uncontrived. The four most beautiful words in any language. Sometimes when you surround yourself with so many painted faces, with their painted personalities you start to lose sight of the fact that the world at large does not look or behave that way. Not everyone wants to paint their blue soul silver, or their red heart gold. Some people keep the colors they were born with.

BECAUSE VANITY BURNS BRIGHTER

2011-01-20T08:30:00.000-08:00

PC: Emma Summerton for Pop Magazine

You fray yourself apart to be important - to be seen, admired, emulated. You float fastidiously on an incandescent belief that you are special. But let's be clear - you're not just special, you are irreverently more than that. You are everything and anything to avoid being somebody's equal. Or worse, somebody's inferior. You need to be the only plus sign on a crowded page of zeros. The brightest light on midnight's horizon. No light can outshine your blinding vanity. Not kindness, not friendship, not love. If there were just one thing I wish I could grasp in this life-time, it would be the secret desire of empty hearts to empty the hearts of others.

A BEAUTIFUL BACTERIA

2011-01-10T18:14:00.000-08:00

We are never so vulnerable to suffering as when we love. No pain runs deeper than that closest to the heart. In love, there's no escaping love. Everything you touch, see, smell and taste reflects the love you carry, and every new emotion takes on the color and fury of the fire in your heart. You will never truly know anger until you've been in love and angry. You will never know loneliness until you've been in love and lonely. Cupid was no god. He was a bacteria.

FALLING OFF YOUR ROCKER

2011-01-09T12:35:00.000-08:00

PC: Michael Tintiuc in Huge Magazine

Do you ever worry that you will lose your mind one day? Do you ever feel like you already have? How fine is the line we're walking? How far is the fall?

THE SWAY & SWELL

2011-01-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

Your heart is a drummer, his song is the only song. And you, unmoved and unwilling, have no choice but to dance. You are stuck in your head like a sunflower seed pressed hard against its shell, deaf to the symphony inside you. But beneath the seal of skin, in the swell of your heart your soul sways like the summer grass caught coiling in the wind. Beyond your shell you are more beautiful than you realize.

PRINTED PROPHECY

2010-11-29T11:00:00.000-08:00

All the antique shops in New York sell antique photographs, tossed loosely in an antique tin. These are the smallest histories, discarded paper pieces of a stranger's heart. Sharp sepia faces no one remembers, whispering memories no one can hear. They break my heart. Perhaps one day, when your own familiar face takes on the exact shape and shadow of a stranger's, you too will find yourself reflected in the rusty tin heart of an antique box waiting to be recognized. We walk blindly, not realizing that these small histories are printed prophecies of a single truth.

Eventually everything is forgotten.

THE IMITATION

2010-11-18T17:36:00.000-08:00

PC: Du Juan

Years and years spent hiding under white wings where neither storm nor sun could touch me. I've laughed hard through tightly shut lips, and only politely tapped my feet to the wildest rhythm of life. My thoughts were echoes of the thoughts of others. Their ideas were the light I basked in, hoping that something unique would grow out of my own heart. Nothing but envy grew. The frame under your skin begins to crack the moment you uncover the lies you've been telling yourself these years and years. To be a creator is to be impelled by creation. To be a hack is to be impelled by praise.

THE DAY AFTER

2010-11-14T10:36:00.000-08:00

PC: Claudia Bitzer

You wait for the day after, because the day after pads the paleness of an uneventful life. We live in leaps. Our minds extend over hollow weeks to star-shaped points on our calendar. We're always looking forward hoping for a distant brightness, unaware that its glare drains the color of everything before. But we need something to look forward to, don't we? We need to be distracted from seeing the fact that most of us are unhappy about the way our lives turned out.

TO HUNGER FOR THE DREAM

2010-11-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

PC: Bruno Ripoche

I always thought that reaching my dreams would feel like winning the lottery. I imagined running, arms-flailing down the street shouting my happiness. But no. Dreams are hard work. It means cereal dinners, 15 hour work days and $0 pay cheques. It means wearing the same three pairs of shoes year after year (even though you've worn the soles in). It's not having a cell phone or a social life. It's accepting that you are going to be very lost for a while, with wolves trailing not too far behind. So when the moment that I've been dreaming of for years finally came, I didn't run or scream or flail my arms as I had expected. I sat back, sighed a sigh of relief, and went out to buy myself some new shoes.

THE CARROT

2010-10-23T22:26:00.000-07:00

At the end of the day, we're all just looking for our carrot. But why is it that the carrots we want most are those furthest out of our reach? My carrot is hidden somewhere under a stack of papers in New York City. It's the freshest carrot of them all.

FALLING LEAVES. FALLING GAZE.

2010-10-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

PC: Claudine Doury

To all the things both sweeter and warmer than the summer sun. I will close my eyes and think of you until June breaks over the horizon once again.

THE DROUGHT

2010-10-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

PC: The Original Hipster by Julia Chesky

His life hung like a rain drop over an empty well. The notes that echoed in his heart were whispers of emptiness and every beating moment was a drought. He had been made a man by lack. The lack of laughter, the lack of friendship, the lack of love. And now that there was nothing left to lose, the fog of self-deception grew thicker still.

FOX AND BUTTERFLY

2010-10-01T08:52:00.000-07:00

PC: Ann He

Sometimes there are no good reasons for why things happen. I'm scared that one day for no good reason I will simply fall out of love. I will wake up and look into the cupboard where I keep my heart, and find that love has flown away...or worse, that it has been eaten by a fox. We stumble, you and I: falling into love, falling into friendship, falling into that job you never dreamed you'd have. Then, when the wind turns suddenly, for no good reason we simply stumble out of love, friendship and that little job you never really wanted to begin with. Why does the wind turn? Perhaps because one rainy autumn day you chose to go right when you should have gone left. Perhaps you chose to lay back and watch the clouds pass when you should have been running after something. Perhaps our hearts were not made to be constant, but to shatter over and over again in order to recreate themselves the way butterflies do.

COMPLETELY ALONE

2010-09-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

PC: Michael Barolet

My grandmother's house lies on the flattest part of Europe, completely encircled by forests like one way roads inviting travelers to explore its wooden organs. If you weren't careful, the trees would absorb you like summer rain. The forest's silhouette is a black spear around the edge of a village no one lives in. You can be completely alone there. Alone, but not lonely.

THE FIRST, FIRST STEP

2010-09-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

PC: Marie Fleur Charlesworth

You walked the straightest line, only to find yourself back where you started. Now that you've receded into the hollow and the magic of that very first step, you've found your heart's broken compass, thinly tracing the winding roads you should have walked at that very first, first step.

FOR THE ONE

2010-09-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

PC: Gil Inoue

The first time I saw him he was the deepest note in the room. Melodies trailed behind him like Christmas sparklers catching fire in his hair. He was the alphabet and the rhythm, and every awkward step was poetry. The air left the room, and holding my breath I listened. Blue eyes met brown. A thousand folded messages fluttered like paper planes against the music, across the room, and into my heart. In the moment's sway we danced palm to sweaty palm. We danced until we never stopped dancing.

UNCOUNTED POSSIBILITES

2010-08-31T06:41:00.000-07:00

PC: Philipp Paulus

You carry the world inside a window. No matter where you are you're always looking out, with your hands folded and The Silence hanging from you like the morning mist. You are a Russian Doll on an endless shelf of Russian dolls. There are a thousand exteriors buried within you, pressed against each other so tightly that each one is indistinguishable from the whole. You are stacked against yourself in an infinite procession of color, one shade always different from the last. You are both far above, and far below. You are both red and blue; both yellow and green with uncounted possibilities in between.

I'M STILL DREAMING

2010-07-20T13:21:00.000-07:00

Morning rubs against the window, sneaking through the blinds and creeping uninvited across the room. The stars fade, but the dreams burning like incense behind her eyes only burn brighter. When was the last time she was awake? Her days were lined with cloud-shaped cotton, padded so softly that she was no longer afraid of falling. She can't tear her eyes away from the sky long enough to look at her feet, and so, how could she know that she isn't flying?

HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE

2010-07-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

Do you remember what it felt like to know the angles of your heart better than the angles of your face? Blindly, you search the darkest part of your memory. But in the end it finds you, softly brushing past your cheek and sticking in your hair, like invisible cobwebs in the night.

NO MORE SECRETS LEFT TO TELL

2010-06-28T11:45:00.001-07:00

When you were smaller then the length of your mother's arm, you would close your eyes and place your index finger squarely on the map. You drew wild concentric circles, blindly cutting across the Pacific Ocean, sweeping through the Russian wheat fields, around the icy hills of Greenland, and into the green bays of Africa. After a deep breath you opened your eyes to your next adventure, and you would fly as far as your imagination could carry you to the unknown places on your tattered map. Every carefully drawn line looping around an pronounceable capital city was a mysterious story waiting to be told. Waiting for an explorer like you to tell it. Back then you were fearless and unstoppable. You could conquer the world you held folded in your back pocket so many years ago, when the world still had a few secrets left to tell.

WANDER, THE FOREST WANDERS

2010-06-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

In the darkness the winter pursues you, waiting for you to give in to the sleep weighing on your tired eyes. It is hard to admit that a seasoned traveler like you could fall victim to these ancient woods. It is even harder to realize that there is no one that would miss you. You are not the first, nor the last lonely hiker to lose his way and wander, inadvertently to this kerosene-lamp-lit shelter, emerging from the white veil out of the knotted slope. In the distance the moon-lit snow illuminated the perilous way, and the smell of burning wood beckoned you until you saw the first flickering flames cast long shadows through the trees, and you knew you were saved. Leaning against the stove you light your last cigarette and listen to the cracking fire waiting for the morning that will guide you home. For the moment you let your eyes wander over the blackened wood and tired old chimney overcome with time. You hear the wind whistle just beyond the sloping roof. The walls creaked in reply, straining to divulge their ancient secrets. You shudder. “If walls could talk, eh” you say lightly to the girl who gives you a cup of warm tea. She laughs, wiping her hands on her apron, “Maybe you should listen more closely,” she replies and shuffles off to the steamy kitchen. You didn’t suspect for an instant that she could possibly be right – that there may be truth in the seemingly absurd. After all, how could such things be true? But everything is so much more than what it seems. When even you are a stranger to your own greatness, how can you expect to see the hidden truth beyond you? I had you marked from the moment I saw you wandering fearfully through the forest. I knew instantly that you were the one soul that would hear my story, and patiently I waited until sleep carried you off to where the dead can speak to the living. I crouched by your pillow, invisible to the world, until your breath became heavy. “Hello,” I said, “My name is H***. It’s nice to finally meet you.” My voice skipped the surface of your dreams like flat stones on water. You smiled. Outside the snow began to fall.

REMEMBER? THESE ARE YOUR MEMORIES.

2010-05-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

You are a maple tree and with every passing season your memories fall away from you and tumble in the wind. Yellow, orange, red and brown - the smell of your first book, the sight of your first love, the taste of the happiest moment of your life - are momentarily replaced by a more vivid green. But with time even your greenest memories will change and be softly torn from you by the passing wind. And you will forget. And yet your memories are all you really have in the end. On the coldest January night all you will have is the dream of summer's past. So do not neglect your falling memories. Capture them like fireflies until you have enough to light your very last and darkest winter night.

DEBATER

2010-03-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

PC: Signe Vilstrup

ME: I'll figure this out as soon as someone tells me which way I'm supposed to be going.
MY HEART: You will never find such a someone, and the longer you look the longer you go nowhere.
ME: But there has always been a map. Someone has always been there tell me what comes next.
MY HEART: And now you've stepped beyond the confines of the sand-box...
ME: I'm scared and want to go back. I don't like it out here.
MY HEART: But out here is where your dreams come true. You are afraid because you realize that you alone get to decide who you become. You don't need a map, you can guide yourself.
ME: So why do I feel so lost?
MY HEART: Because you are scared that the road you have chosen in your heart is the wrong one. Only there is no wrong road. Which ever way you go you will end up where you wanted. You have your dreams, now go follow the yellow brick road.

BE SOMEBODY

2010-03-14T07:48:00.000-07:00

PC: Paolo Roversi

YOUR SECRETS

2010-02-12T14:58:00.001-08:00

PC: Vanina Sorrenti

Whatever you do, don't look in the mirror. No, not the one hanging on your wall; the one you keep folded and tucked beneath your heart like a paper napkin under a dinner plate. The truth hangs from your lips for only a moment before you wipe it away and fold it out of sight. Whatever you do, don't look at the mess you've made. Don't dim the lights that allow you to believe that you are good. Better than good - you are an example for others to emulate. Isn't that why you like the attention? Don't worry, the chances of some curious stranger coming along to examine you (drawn to your shining goodness), and turning you over to expose the things you hide are lower than low. You are safe. For now.

Jealousy, arrogance, selfishness, greed, materialism - they are as much a part of you as the colour of your eyes. But you don't wear your flaws the way you do your virtues, draped like diamonds on every finger for everyone to see. Your flaws are your secrets to keep, but keep them so that you forget you are their keeper. Remembering will be the end of the you you've created. This is your most fragile reflection. More fragile than the spring time frost sleeping on your morning window. Though it is true that some reflections were made to be broken, you have realized that they can be kept whole through strength of will...or fear. It is a fact of life. But you don't believe me, do you? In fact, you don't even realize I'm talking to you. None of this concerns you. You keep your secrets well. For now.

2010-02-10T08:58:00.001-08:00

PC: Zackery Michael

You wait for the light - that moment of perfect clarity when all reasons become obvious. All those things you've always wanted to do suddenly fold before you like paper planes and carry you beyond the clouds where the sky is bluest. You wait and you wait, believing that patience is your greatest obstacle. You are sure that beyond the storm clouds lies a path heavily marked with colorful sign posts pointing the way to your happiness. Like you, it waits for that perfect moment to show you the way. But life promises no tomorrows, and existence is truly only marked by each consecutive heart-beat. There is no path beyond the storm. The path is the storm, and one day tomorrow may never arrive. Rest in peace Alexander McQueen.

THE LOVE AND THE LIE

2010-02-08T11:36:00.001-08:00

PC: Andrea Gandini

The first breaths of love passed through her and out of her ecstatically, but more or less as she had planned. It was an ecstasy she waited for all her life. An ecstasy she had in fact expected. She kept all her secrets tucked into this one expectation. Secrets so deep she herself wasn't even aware of them. And then he swept into her life like a fall of autumn leaves painting the world red and yellow. He was the father she never had and the friend she always wanted. His perfect eyes and angles mirrored the beauty she always wished she was, and by choosing her she knew that at least she was beautiful enough for him. He listened intently to her stories and she found that in the curve of his attention her life was justified. She wasn't famous, nor was she extraordinarily talented; yet wrapped in the veils of his love she could finally believe that none of it mattered, that love would redeem every flaw and elevate her beyond the rest. She settled back and closed her eyes to the places where his lights could not shine. She kept her eyes closed so long in revelry, by the time she opened them again the landscape was overgrown and unfamiliar and the feelings that had been home to her for so long seemed strangely out of place. She didn't expect love to transform into this strange place - an unmarked space on an empty map. The darkest valleys inside her carved ever deeper into her heart, and she found that despite her expectations love did not redeem her. Even under the glow of his attention, she had been perfectly ordinary all along. The magic was gone, and with it went the lie. Now she can't remember if she ever loved him afterall.

THE NATURAL INCLINE

2010-01-27T08:54:00.000-08:00

One way or another I'm stuck between a possible and a natural incline. The possibilities are endless but my talents are not. I can be a lawyer, doctor or an accountant if I so choose - but I cannot choose my talents. They choose me. Lawyer, doctor, accountant: The more I try to make myself fit these unfamiliar sizes the more awkward I feel. In the end, happiness seems to depend on the natural inclination of my passions, no matter what splendor of possibilities lie on my horizon. Sometimes the most difficult decision in your life is to choose happiness.

KEEP TO THE MARGINS

2010-01-22T11:05:00.001-08:00

The less she felt the less she wanted to feel. She was a January river, tucked coldly into the darkness far beyond the reach of human eyes. The world, robbed of all its color, shone that much brighter for its simplicity. Sorrow brushed by her like the midnight wind whistling unacknowledged, unable to penetrate the veil of her dreams. With time, even her dreams faded to gray. She found a blissful numbness somewhere between black and white, but she couldn't run away from her memories. They lived beyond her numbness and haunted her in a way her dreams could not. In the sunshine of her memory she saw the unforgettable color of her mother's hair and felt the softness of her favorite blue and yellow striped sweater. She remembered the smell of her fathers cologne, and the way he would hang pink paper hearts from her bedroom window. No matter how gray her life had been the memory of beauty lingered in the margins like the song of a bird that, unseen among the branches, filled the January morning with sunshine.

YOU ARE THE MASTER-MIND

2010-01-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

At an undocumented moment in the windy halls of your memory, the dark flower bloomed and with it came the insatiable thirst to be recognized. To be recognized like a single familiar word in a foreign novel floating to the surface from the chaos. Instinctively and intimately you hold it to your heart. In the same way you, a lonely satellite falling through your beautiful trajectory, long to be recognized by some distant observer whose telescope was made only to find you. You walk through the crowds gathering on the street romancing the strangers who happen to look your way. Your thoughts shine as you look back in their direction, beckoning, "Do you recognize me?" Strangers become lovers and then strangers again, and in your disappointment you feel more lost than ever. You are a lonely satellite with nothing to orbit and unable to see that no telescope can penetrate the walls of your well-worn heart. There is no observer clever enough to disarm your heart's defenses without the master-mind that created them.

MEMORY OF SMALLNESS

2010-01-01T02:41:00.000-08:00

Despite the many years you've traveled from that very first day, you've carried the smallness with you everywhere, and with it the smell of crayons, and carousel music. It is a distant lullaby you can barely remember but remain haunted by its sparkling melody. Despite yourself, you remember. The time your parents guests arrived and you felt excited by all the commotion. Everyone was laughing and talking largely with their hands far above your head. You craned your neck in order to see over the table. No one noticed you. No one ever noticed you when the party got rolling. So, naturally you assumed that you're invisible. An indistinguishable speck of dust drifting unnoticed around the room. But with time you managed to fill the room and forget these distant echoes of pain. Now you are bigger than the table and bigger than the chair and don't need all five fingers to hold a fork, but inside the smallness endures, playing hide and seek with your consciousness. You are tall enough to see past all the fences in your neighbourhood, but you will always carry the memory of smallness tucked under your heart. Sometimes in the midst of talking and laughter you find yourself suddenly wondering whether they can see you at all. Whether you're really even distinguishable from the shimmering dust that fills the air between you and them.

WHEN BETTER IS WORSE

2009-12-16T07:07:00.000-08:00

PS: weheartit.com

You got curious, so you reached deep down. You ventured into the heart of your own darkness with the hope of lighting a flame and truly seeing, for the first time, who you really are. You thought you could claim the shadows and come back shaken, but stronger than before. You never considered that the shadows may claim you. When I saw you again your eyes were hollow and luminescent like Japanese lanterns. You said you were enlightened, but I could see that you were merely blind to the darkness that still lingers beyond the lights. You were overcome with the light. High on it. Your glowing eyes made you lose sight of the dark islands of pain in the people around you. How could you fail to see that even the sun cannot shine without casting a shadow?

OPEN YOUR EYES

2009-12-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

PC: Martina Hoogland Ivanow

Open. Close. Your eyes are clouded with the things you haven't left behind. You blink and in that instant everything changes. What happened? You watch life move around you, and it is a story projected to you by your heart. It is your heart, not your eyes, that decides to see the softness in the fallen snow rather than the dead leaves and rotting flowers underneath. Open. Close. What do you see? Life is neither darkness nor light and in everything that's beautiful there is also foul. And yet, when your heart weighs heavily on your eyes and the stories they whisper back to it are tragedies painted gray, your heart will paint the whole world gray. In the sudden sweep of sadness all the colors are washed away and you become a stranger to the world; a color-blind projector of your broken heart. Do you see? The world is waiting just beyond your sorrow. Open. Close.

THE SILENT MUSIC

2009-12-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

He could have been a cedar planted among cedars; indistinguishable from the rest all swaying in unison to the silent music of the wind. He could have been a cedar because at the end of the day he wasn't afraid to be a nobody. He knew he was just like the others and this knowledge rooted him against the storms of fall and ice of winter. His solid cedar heart was never twisted with the longing to fly above the rest as a bird flies. He watched his friends splinter as their branches reached for an unattainable horizon and he knew that they would never be happy. He marveled that the sky could break one's heart simply by being. Up there. Unattainable. He felt his roots reach deep into the black earth softly pressing against him on all sides the way his mother did before he could even remember. He was alive. He was happy. Swaying softly to the silent music, far beneath the sky.

HOPE AND BRAVERY

2009-12-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

Bravely bravely they told her. Life won’t destroy you. But after years of standing tall beneath the heavy sky, she began to stoop like a sunflower burdened with its fruition. At any moment she was going to snap in two and fall to the soft earth in pieces where she would be picked apart by hungry animals. And it seemed that everyone was hungry to pick her apart – to devour her out of existence. Sinking in the deep dark grass that hadn’t been cut all summer, she gave up. Her resignation letter was written carelessly on her soul, folding over against the weight of her words and placed warily under a star shaped thought blowing from the empty halls of her heart where hope used to be.

HER SONG

2009-12-01T17:17:00.000-08:00

PC: Waldemar and Max

She sang to me, her words reverberating like broken strings on a Spanish guitar. But softly - softer than any old guitar could sing. Every broken note filling the empty places in my broken heart until it was whole again. The song carried through the day and wrapped around the glowing stars at night. In the morning, she sang me into existence. But all songs must end. And in ending, this song flung my ribs open like a bird cage and let the ghosts of her melody fly from the holes time could not heal. I lost myself searching for the forgotten memory of her voice. Time was the last string, and she broke that too.

NO END IN SIGHT

2009-11-30T11:55:00.000-08:00

PC: Toby Burrows

It is precisely because life is too short that I'm scared to live it. One wrong move and the precious few moments I have are clipped like a bird's wings, forever tying me to the choices I have made. Too many mistakes and instead of flying I'm flapping vainly, moving empty air around a pathless life that was made to be seen from the clouds. I cannot see where I'm going from way down here. Every night I dream of leaving the ground behind and cutting a small space for myself in the sky. Becoming a spinning satellite with no end in sight.

LOVE AND DARKNESS

2009-11-29T08:40:00.000-08:00

PC: Gred Williams

Her love was a crescent moon, forever waning until nothing remained to illuminate the darkness that clung, always waiting, around the edges. She loved him precisely because his eyes looked through her, coldly, indifferently, without even being aware that her crescent heart burst yearning only for him. She loved him precisely because he didn’t love her. Until one dark winter morning, for no particular reason, his eyes turned and suddenly saw her. She stood gripping her crescent heart, quivering in anticipation of the coming rejection that would set her glowing miserably. He smiled. All the lights went out.

TO BE CAESAR

2009-11-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

PC: Paul Rowland

He waited for a reason. Any reason. But it was an island he couldn't reach. Life just was...undefinable. He was a drifting shadow on a grain of salt orbiting a burning match in a vastness he couldn't bear to imagine. It was really all a dream and when only when he'd die would he wake up and know the reason. All his life he had wanted to be Caesar because just being himself never seemed enough. It never occurred to him that had he attained his greatest dream - had he become Caesar, he would still be the same quiet lonely kid he had always been, and given this fact, would probably be wildly disappointed with the position.

A STRANGER

2009-11-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

PC: Kevin Macintosh

She felt so small she could sail the paper boats she liked to set on the water. She would watch them grow smaller and small, thrown by the waves and thrashed by the wind, and her soul would sail in pursuit of the small white speck on an infinite rolling sea. To sail through storms only to rinse her broken heart the way her mother rinsed the dishes after dinner. To come out on the other side of the world a stranger to everyone, but to her heart especially.

HIDDEN DIALOGUE

2009-10-29T14:19:00.000-07:00

- Hey, I know you!
Will she remember me?

- Hey!
How do I look?

- How've you been?
I've missed you.

- Not bad.
Lost. The city is bigger than me. My body is bigger than me. I feel so much smaller than I am.

- Good. You look great!
She looks great.

- Thank you.
He's lying.

- Did I catch you at a bad time?
I hope you stay a while.

- No, I was just walking home.
I hope you'll walk with me.

- Ah, well I don't want to keep you.
She doesn't have time.

- Oh...alright. Some other time then.
He doesn't have time.

KILLING TIME

2009-10-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

PC: Steven Meisel

They shimmered like the ocean on a summer's day. A million tear-drop diamonds dropped into the sea breaking the light into a million directions. They had no direction. No plan. They were swept up by their youth, their talent, and a bottomless agenda. Days were crossed off like items on a list. Sometimes he would look at her just to remind himself what her eyes looked like, and every time he did he found them changed. Had it been a year already? They thought they were just killing time. But in fact, time was just killing them.

SILENT SYMPHONY

2009-10-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

The first time he saw her he felt his soul try to leave his body. All breath left him and his teeth rattled. He saw his future weaved into her hair, falling across he skin and playing between her eye lashes. And it scared the rhythm out of his heart. He never looked at her again. He didn't dare, as long as he valued his freedom. She always sat at the other end of the cafe under a large window where the dust drifted glistening above her head like a silent symphony. And he knew every note by heart. She dropped into his dreams like a coin into a hollow well followed by a wish. The echo of her presence carried through his days, never waning. Always waxing. One day they had bumped into each other reaching for the sugar by the cash register. It was snowing outside and their touch released a static spark. She looked up at him and laughed a deep hot chocolate laugh. That spark nearly set him on fire. He found himself reflected wildly among the lights dancing in her eyes. He looked away. He would not be captive. When she did not come the following week he was unsettled. When she failed to come in the weeks that passed thereafter quiet anxiety turned to dread. In the sweep of spring he realized that the only thing he feared more than losing his freedom was losing her. He never saw her again, but the echo of her memory never waned. Always waxed - long after his hair turned gray. He never even knew her name.

THE BIG HURT

2009-10-12T16:53:00.000-07:00

Through it all I sat prostrated unable to move a finger. The big hurt pressed existence down to a single dimension and I was made of stone simply because my heart was not. No, but it was heavy. Heavier than anything else on earth, and all because he didn't love me. He who was lighter, and about as important, as the sand that catches in your hair on a windswept day. The more time dragged me along the more the big hurt hardened my skin against the world. I became a statue and my heart grew cold in its tomb. Years passed before true love would find me waiting, unmoved. And it fell like a hammer from the sky, freeing me from the past in a million flying pieces.

HER STAR HUNG HIGH

2009-10-09T17:35:00.000-07:00

PC: Norbert Schoerner

Her star never hung high, but when it fell it burned up brighter than any of the others. In her quiet dress behind the cash register her talents taunted her, and she was ashamed. As a student she outshone her peers, and there was never any doubt that she, in all her sparkling champagne brilliance, would one day be somebody. Years passed, and when "one day" had come, she found herself lost completely. Tucked away in the produce aisle, the future shimmered before her like a desperate hallucination in the driest corner of the earth. An island of cold anticipation in the light. A spotlight on the body.

HEARTACHE OF A STRANGER

2009-10-04T18:20:00.000-07:00

PC: Randall Slavin

She wanted to scream until her lungs collapsed. Scream and scream and scream until someone heard her. "My heart hurts," she wanted to say, "I'm here, but I'm not. I have a name, but I feel nameless. I feel like I was born yesterday and inherited all the heartache of a stranger."

YOU ARE A FISH

2009-10-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

PC: www.weheartit.com

Swim swim. The waves break and the sky rolls black over your head. The water shivers far below the surface you tread. And you keep on swimming thinking that surely you're getting somewhere. You breast stroke your life away unable to see that you're a fish and belong under water.

RAGE AND THEN REGRET

2009-09-30T18:55:00.000-07:00

PC: Camila Akrans

He hated the moment he knew the day was over. The sky had barely turned pink and the birds fell silent. Another day was gone. Every evening he clenched his fist against the setting sun so as not to count his regrets. He would pace his room, and beat his fist through the wall and against his chest, trying to still the ticking nestled, like an unbreakable egg, between his lungs. He wished for the day the sun would not set. The day he would never have to die. The day regret lost all meaning.

ONE MINUTE

2009-09-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

PSource: weheartit.com

It's nothing more than a dream. Just a dream. The entirety of your life. One minute you're barefoot chasing dreams like fireflies and the next you forget the feeling of the grass and why you're even running in the first place. Years go by and as the colours fade you know, but unable to admit, that your fireflies have left you. There is nothing else to guide you through the darkened night and you remain forever solemn, staring out the window waiting for the flickering lights.

DESIGNER INSIDES

2009-09-27T19:20:00.001-07:00

Nothing will ever look as good on you as happiness.

THE STALE AIR

2009-09-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

PC: Mel Karch

He told her stories. His words twisted around her unresponsive body and she began to listen. The stale air filled with magic and her mind turned from the pain to the flow of words coming from his mouth. Her imagination flamed wildly - a forest fire chasing the shadows from where they hid in her heart.

YES AND YES Txema Yeste

2009-09-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

PC: Txema Yeste

Yes and yes. A thousand times yes. Even small requests carry, wrapped quietly within them, monumental galaxy-forming possibilities. You can't afford a single no, and even a single no can change the course of your existence, carrying you further from your dreams.

LIFE'S DISTRACTIONS

2009-09-10T11:13:00.000-07:00

PC: Rengim Mutevellioglu

She spun and she spun, shifting from one room to the next, from one city to another - she was little more than a faint dash of light in her family photos and to her friends she was always light years away. she could not sit still. And if by some quiet magic she fell rooted to a single place, her hands shook and she chewed on her finger-nails until they hurt. There was no stillness for her. When life failed to distract her, she failed to want to live it.

PALE LIGHT

2009-07-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

PC: Francesca Tallone

She stood waiting for the street-light to turn green. She was a crescent moon caught waxing on the other side of a river made of moving steel. She tugged on the front of her shirt with her free hand; smoking a cigarette irritably with the other. She was beautiful in her round luminescence but, just as a flash-light cannot turn to illuminate itself, she remained ignorant of her light. She tugged on her shirt again to flatten her roundness. She would have flattened her own soul if someone told her it made her look fat.

MANUFACTURED SELVES

2009-07-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

PC: Magdalena Kmiecik

The shelf is tall and the aisle is long, and I, small and insignificant, sit lost to myself among the objects there. I am a product. I am a manufactured decision put on the shelf for you to choose - or not choose - as you wish. Will you choose me? Am I worth the price? Will you be my friend? Lover? Employer? Teacher? Or will I be redesigned and repackaged to suit your needs? Reach into the bag and pull out a suitable handful of characteristics. A new sense of humour, a new political stance, new likes and dislikes. A new me among a million new yous put on the shelf along the endless aisle, where nothing but the system remains permanent. Personality is a process - the bastard chunks left on your plate which you are bound to wash away or discard.

FOR SHIN

2009-07-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

Her heart fed his vanity, so he kept it in his pocket and painted the masks he wore with the dreams he found in her unconditional affection. He put her down softly. So softly that his dark words sounded like love songs. He held no mirrors in his soul and looked at himself reflected in her eyes, because in them he found his flaws erased. She loved him and he loved that she loved him, so he broke her heart slowly. He furnished the spaces inside her with quiet confusion and self doubt until his invisible flaws became her own. He remained perfect in her eyes.

ARTISTIC GENIUS

2009-07-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

The most beautiful words can pass through the grayest tightly clenched teeth. Even I, the grayest thing of all, can create something remarkably unlike myself.

CUT YOUR HAIR AND GET A JOB

2009-07-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

You are loved and your happiness is important to those who love you. When they told you not to cut your hair they really believed it wouldn't suit you. You really wanted to try, but were too scared that they were right. So your hair stayed long. They expressed many reservations when you suggested that you wanted to go to art school. They said that art didn't pay and that they want you to have a comfortable life. You didn't want to be comfortable - you wanted to take a risk, but were scared not to heed their warning. So you went to law school instead. But art followed you. It came to you every night and every morning. It swooped from the tree-tops and, when you looked up from your case briefs, you saw it written in the clouds and heard it carried in the wind. They told you to get your head out of the clouds and into your books. They were scared you wouldn't graduate. But you did graduate and you found a quiet office job where you wrapped yourself in moderately priced cotton suits under flickering florescent lights. After work, alone in your apartment, you created your silent works of art the only way you could - as a half-neglected part-time hobby. In your heart you remained asleep by your desk under the florescent lights and only came alive at night, covered in inspiration. One day, without saying a word, you left work early. Standing barefoot in the bathroom you cut off all your hair and found that it suited you perfectly. You enrolled in art school that very night.

FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER WITH A SECRET

2009-06-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

PC: Giuliano Bekor

She was a fashion photographer with a secret. To her designer fashion was a smeared question mark on soiled paper lying somewhere at the bottom of a well. Yet she read Vogue with a racing heart. The words didn't matter, the dresses didn't matter - not even the pretty models with their small doll-like faces mattered. What mattered was the strange and mysterious combination of all these. She didn't want to sell anything - she wanted to create art. She didn't want to lie to anyone - play it off like anyone could purchase the fantasy in her pictures. As if the fantasy could ever be embodied in a pair of shoes, or a high-waisted dress, or a studded jacket. She didn't want to sell out.

SECRET TRUTHS

2009-06-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

It was 1935 when young Esmeralda turned sixteen. She got a new dress and she wore it to school where everyone would notice. Esmeralda was petty. Her teachers and parents believed that she would always remain insignificant to the world - like the period in a sentence that one skims absentmindedly and quickly forgets. Even her friends thought her ugly because her heart was made of coals. It wasn't until many years had passed, as Esmeralda lay withering quietly in a concentration camp, that the truth came out. Night had fallen and in it's silence Esmeralda heard a rustling at the foot of her bunk. Her old teacher, toothless and bend with exhaustion, stood stealing the shoes off her former student's feet. Their eyes met and, frozen in shameful recognition, the teacher let her gaze drop. Silently, the girl kicked off her shoes and went back to sleep. In the morning she walked barefoot to work in the snow.

IF YOU WERE A MAP

2009-06-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

PC: Marc Mez

If you were a map could you locate yourself on it? Could you take a detour?

KEEP YOUR ELBOWS IN & YOUR EYES DOWN

2009-06-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

PC: weheartit.com

She felt so lonely her gums ached for company. She took to coffee shops in order to be around people. Alone, her heart was an empty coloring-book, but the presence of people filled it with rainbow-scribble laughter. At the coffee shop they sat separated by as much space as they could manage, unless all the seats were taken and there was no other option but close proximity. Sitting there she always hoped for a divine spark to descend from heaven and ignite a passionate conversation between these strangers sitting elbow to elbow with eyes deliberately averted. The spark never came, but occasionally someone would smile at her silently. He heart would quicken in anticipation until the sense of opportunity dissipated and she felt as alone as ever. Was she the only one who felt this way? Where their walls eredcted to keep people like her away? Or were they waiting, as she was, just beyond their averted eyes?

HORRIFYING REALITY

2009-06-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

PC: Therese Fische

She spent all her life in a box. She thought it was cozy. Then one day she woke up to find the box blown away, tattered and disappearing over the horizon. The sky curved blue and violet over her head and she realized, for the first time, just how large it was. She wondered what she was going to do with all the free space the sky, suddenly so very exposed without the usual limits placed on it, afforded her. She felt lost in its wide expanse. Only then did she see that, all her life, she wasn't really cozy but caged. Freedom can be a horrifying reality to those who have remained slaves to the darkness.

OPEN YOUR EYES TO THE DAY

2009-06-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

PC: Terry Smith

His shoes were too big and flopped like slippers on his sockless feet. If he ever wore a shirt, he liked to wear his favorite (and only) t-shirt with a life-sized portrait of a Labrador Retriever printed in full color on both sides of the wrinkled fabric. He smoked cheap cigarettes through chapped lips, spoke with a tired raspy voice and remained happy every moment of his life. Everything he owned he had acquired from strangers' caring hands, or else from the empty night time streets. Every morning he smiled before he opened his eyes to the day.

OWN WORST ENEMY

2009-06-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

PC: Hedi Slimane

He couldn't remember when he first became angry. What started as an almost imperceptible stain quickly decayed and spread through him like rust, leaving a open chasm where his compassion used to be. He hated people, especially those who were entirely different from him. Sometimes he became so angry that he'd find the most horrifying thoughts shoot through his head like dragons in a cloud of smoke. And the rust continued to spread, eventually taking over his reason as well. He was caught in a closed circle. The more he hated others, the more he expected to be hated. The more he wanted to hurt those around him, the more he feared others wanted to hurt him. These irrational fears evoked the wind of an even deeper hatred which only further fed the fear in his heart. He needed to be saved from himself.

ESCAPE THE CLUTTER

2009-05-31T09:15:00.000-07:00

PC: weheartit.com

She packed her bags while the sun lay winking coyly at the horizon. Her parents slept wrapped up warmly like burritos in their blankets - completely oblivious to her plans as they always were. Their home was large and expensive; her closet was a micro-cosmos of the house, and she was a receptacle of everyone's expectations. They were "lucky" as her mother always called it, and this meant that there were certain rules she had to follow - certain schools she must attend, certain people she had to meet. She didn't feel lucky. She felt cluttered and unnatural. Now, as the sun sighed its first morning breath over the horizon, she headed north. Towards the mountains.

ONE SMALL UNIVERSE

2009-05-26T09:32:00.001-07:00

PC: Michelangelo di Battista with model Rosie Whiteley

An idea - a story begins to form in the tired mind of an old author as he sits alone by the fire. He sips his cognac and the characters materialize as of their own volition in his drowsy mind. They take on definite angles which fill with light and shadow. Their hollow bodies fill with thoughts and desires. Their hollow universe fills with history. They dance and sing and make love; they wage wars against one another and make peace in the brief interval our author hangs between waking and sleeping. Perhaps one day they will materialize on ink smeared paper and claim some small part of this existence. Or else, they will disappear forever the moment the cognac takes effect and our author's head falls soundly sleeping on his chest. Unbeknown to them, their fate hangs uncertain in the balance.

Does Life Start the Moment You Grow Up?

2009-05-18T20:25:00.000-07:00

PC: Paolo Roversi "Class of 2006" in Vogue Feb 08

Seems like the moment we grow up we need to start running away from our childhood memories. They are not the frame that contains your portrait. Your memories have nothing to do with you. Before there is choice, before there is even the possibility of choice to act or not act, we cannot say that our lives are our own. We are then like figures in someone else's dream.

REACH FOR THE...

2009-05-15T08:13:00.000-07:00

PS: weheartit.com

TRUTH

2009-05-13T19:58:00.000-07:00

PS: weheartit.com

The moment pure light passes through the prisms of our eyes it bends and scatters into the colors we have spent a life-time expecting to see. Colors that accurately paint a picture of you in the most vivid detail but that hold no resemblance to the original beam of truth you hoped to see. So much of what we believe in is merely the frosty breath of an unknown figure hiding in the shadows of our imaginations.

MOTHER'S DAY

2009-05-08T21:25:00.001-07:00

To the Mother I never had,

I watched you slump over the kitchen table with a long slim matinee smoking between your well-manicured fingers. Your hands always fluttering between mouth and cigarette. If you had payed attention to everyone as you did to your cigarettes you would have seen rainbows appear out of your storm clouds. Rainbows I would have given anything to bask in. Instead I basked in your self-hatred. There were times I felt that loving you, hating yourself, would stop my heart from beating. Still, I would have given my life to weave the frayed fabric of your heart back together. But my life did no posses the necessary magic that could have saved you. You were always softly outlined in pencil. You had no essence and the lightest touch rubbed you out of existence. I felt incapable of hugging you. I wished it had been different. I wished I could have seen you completely lit up: the sun shining on you face, and your darkest shadows always falling behind you unnoticed. I wish you could have found your peace, and in that peace, the people who always loved you.

BEAUTY

2009-05-07T22:38:00.000-07:00

PC: Camilla Akrans

No one has ever given you intelligent and sincere knowledge about your beauty. You are absolutely unique, and therefore cannot realize how beautiful you are. You cannot open a magazine and see someone with all your angles and lines because they belong to a mold only you can fill. Life is not a rose garden, but a meadow overrun with unexpected streaks of color, texture and light that goes far beyond your imagination. There is no beauty in uniformity. You are not the symmetrical carbon copy of a carbon copy. You are immeasurably better than that.

I AM YOU LOOKING AT ME

2009-05-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves."
~ JOHN BERGER~

LOVE WON'T SAVE YOU

2009-05-02T15:35:00.000-07:00

PC: Elliot Jimenez

In the first few months his heart was made of wind and feathers, and the sight of her sent them whirling softly through his body. But the feathers always turned to sink water faster than he expected. When that happened, he jumped ship only to find the same wet feathers eventually tumbling through the sink drain in his chest. For years he believed that he was incapable of love and incapable of being loved. Where did he get the idea that Love would save him? That it would permanently turn the coals of his heart to gold? Love did not save him. It only reflected his soul without adding anything but clarity.

EMPTY PAGES

2009-04-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

PC: David Vasiljevic LINK

You are a loose staple holding up the blank pages of your life. You will one day get caught in the rain. Your pages will not fill with words then but with damp sensations. All that was written before will be washed away leaving shadows of uncertainty where there was once a smooth uncorrupted map of where you hoped you were heading. You will plan new words and force them onto the pages only to realize that they were all wrong all along. You will learn that you are not the person you wished to describe but an imaginary future self you may never become. You will outline your expectations in thick straight lines never expecting to find disappointment hidden in the margins, even when it works out just as you planned. Perhaps in time you will learn not to expect anything from a life you can neither predict nor control. Maybe if you let go of your expectations the world will then fill you with involuntary paragraphs that tell the story of your life - more beautiful than anything you could have imagined on your own.

ARTFASHIONARTFASHIONARTFASHION

2009-04-25T14:39:00.000-07:00

PC: Steven Meisel Vogue Italia April 2009

Mr. Fashion-Industry can be so impossibly fickle and transient. One moment he is tearing your heart and soul out of your chest calling you a fat fuck, and the next moment fat becomes the new skinny and he’s purring “darling...” in your ear. The more I live in the world, the more I see a hypocritical contrast in myself and in everything - everywhere. I feel like there's always a small part of us that tries to be something we're not. Nothing makes this more obvious than fashion. I wonder whether fashion magazines should have any words in them at all and instead remain a strictly visual art. Sometimes, the words confuse the point. One page is telling me to “give to those in need" and the next page suggests that I cannot be truly happy if my hair isn’t shiny. How does one reconcile these extremes? Should I donate to charity as they suggest, or buy those seven hundred dollar panties on the next page? Am I supposed to go to that environmental awareness gala in order to help in some way or is it just another excuse to have my picture taken in that fifteen hundred dollar cotton dress? Can I reconcile the psychological depravity that seems to be fashion’s shadow, with an honest appreciation of beauty? How much longer can this go on? I cannot dive deep in shallow water.

DON'T WORRY, IT'S JUST YOUR LIFE

2009-04-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

Marta Cernicka/DeviantART/Carla Pires on Flickr

Choice is one of the greatest deceptions. We lead our lives with our hearts even when we think we're don't. The heart wins a silent victory against the brain every day without setting off any warning bells. In the end choice has little to do with alternatives, and everything to do with where your heart wants to take you. Any road you choose will lead you to the one road you must walk. As long as you're walking, all roads will lead you there. So don't stand wide-eyed frozen in frear of the future. Choose, and never doubt that you have made the right decision because inevitably the choice you choose is an illusion. Your heart made the decision long before your brain found the courage to voice it. Even in the darkness of your own uncertain mind, your heart will find the faintest flickering light to lead you towards your fate.

FALLING OUT OF LOVE

2009-04-20T22:41:00.000-07:00

Source

She was the world and he was her Atlas. He held her up on his shoulders because he believed that without him she would fall. She let him hold her up because she wasn't sure what would happen if he let go. She was scared of falling. But with every passing day she grew more and more curious, and her curiosity carried her imagination far beyond the safety of his arms. In her dreams she was shattering happily through the sky like a rain drop falling towards the brightest ocean. Her dreams unleashed a soft wind that swept through her like a melody. It blew from somewhere deep inside her making the chimes in her heart sparkle with music. As she blinked she saw the swift movement of white clouds breeze across the blue sunny day behind her eyes. Suddenly, she found that his arms were no longer lovingly holding her up. They were holding her down.

QUEEN OF THE SIDEWALK

2009-04-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

PC: Friedemann Hauss
Wherever she went she was the center of all things. Without question. She owned it all - the shoes, the bags and the clothing hanging decadently in her closet like the rarest diamonds. When she stepped out the wind played coyly in her hair and in the folds of her dress, and everyone stared at her consumed with a single question: Who was she? They never doubted for an instant that she was somebody. She was Queen of the Sidewalk. On the weekends she'd wake up early and dress herself with the greatest ceremony. Then she'd wait. She waited and waited looking more devastatingly gorgeous with every passing minute that granted her the time to perfect on perfection. With no one there to ratify the existence of her beauty it was as good as a dream. She needed someone - anyone to see her. Day passed and night came. Her phone remained silent. If only she had somewhere to go. Looking like the very embodiment of magic, and with no real destination in mind, she took to the streets alone. With her hair a flawless fall of waves cascading over the soft Chanel dripping off her shoulders, she could feel the familiar cull of eyes trailing behind her as she walked by aimlessly. She felt whole again.

THE>FIRST>TIME>THE>FIRST>TIME>THE>FIRST

2009-04-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

PC: Martin Lidell

She never wanted to fall in love. Never. She thought love was a strange game people played to make their dull lives more interesting by making them more miserable. There were never any roses in the eyes of those she met who had fallen into the esoteric well of love. Dripping from the ruddy wet cheeks and red-rimmed eyes of the women who huddled around her kitchen table she saw an impossible spectrum of pain - from the lighter shades of guilt to the blackest black of betrayal. Then, one day, she fell into the well herself and stayed in the darkness for a long time filling it with her tears. When the tears ran out, and there wasn't a single drop left for him she realized her tears had brought her to the very mouth of the well. She swam out into the light and as she did the well vanished before her eyes. She would never fall in love again. The next time she would fly to the highest stars.

YOU.ME.I.AM.YOU.ME.I.AM.YOU

2009-04-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

Jeanete

PC: GL Wood

Despite what they say, you are not original. The truth is a lot less colorful. There are billions of people on a planet that, in the greater scheme of things, is nothing more glamorous than a floating speck of dust orbiting a vast nothingness. This small speck of dust is home to even smaller specks - people that dress like you, look like you, speak like you, think like you, want what you want and feel exactly what you feel. You're going to have to come to terms with the fact that your dreams are the dreams of a million simultaneously beating hearts. Close your eyes and listen: together they hum like an ocean swelling over and crashing against your ears. If you don't write it, run it, design it, say it, draw it, build it, mold it, dance it, fight it, or sing it like you've always wanted to, someone else will. What are you still waiting for?

PHOTOGRAPHER: STEFANO MORO

2009-04-03T19:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.
~Ansel Adams

THE REAL LIFE OF A FANTASY

2009-04-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Robert Pattinson (from Twilight) in GQ MAGAZINE

Can you fall in love with someone who technically doesn't exist? Have you ever been so captivated by a character that he stepped out of the book that created him and into your head? Do you stay up at night dreaming about him as if he were real? What an elegantly subtle way to fall in love with your own mind.

Side Note: I've never seen anything worse than Twilight the movie.

HELLO, HOW ARE YOU?

2009-04-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

PHOTOGRAPHER: HEDI SLIMANE

He couldn't dance or sing; felt equally lost with words as with numbers, and his hands felt like two flopping jellyfish when it came to crafting anything from scratch. Admittedly, he wasn't very talented. He worked at the post office. Sorting mail. Selling stamps. An unexceptional job for an unexceptional guy. He was devastatingly ordinary in every respect, except one. Everything changed the moment she came in. The masks she carried, painted meticulously around her eyes and rubbed into her cheeks, failed to mask her truth from him. Some days she'd walk in carrying colorful parcels, smiling brightly under her red lipstick and he knew that secretly her heart was breaking. Loving her was his best and only talent.

SWEET EMOTION

2009-03-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

Chadwick Tyler

Dear you,

I wonder if you're crying. It's true that I don't know you, and I likely never will - yet I think about you all the time and wish there was some way I could make you smile. I wish I could show you how amazing you are. This world would be a shadow of itself if you were gone.

THE BREAK UP

2009-03-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

You thought you couldn't live without him. On that very first day the weeks and months stretched ahead of you to infinity. They wrapped around the world, then circled the moon and drifted onwards to the very end of the universe. You followed this empty time as it skipped lazily across the sky. It forced you to look up at the stars until you lost yourself in their beauty. Suddenly, much to your surprise, time stood still as the sun rose and your broken heart was filled with light.

DOES IT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE PRETTY?

2009-03-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

PC: Sebastiao Salgado

A still smooth lake reflects the passing clouds directly above it. The lake cannot help this and neither can you who are both reflected and reflector all in one - you will always mirror your environment. It’s only natural. It’s only fair. Vogue on your book shelf, Chloe in your closet, and Miu Miu on your feet, you surround yourself with art. You literally drape yourself with beauty. You collect fashion editorials because they are beautiful, and beauty inspires you (how could it not?). But eventually, there comes a point when I can’t stand it anymore. The art, the beauty, the inspiration are all too shiny and calculated to seem real. I need to remember that there is something so deeply imperfect lying, neatly hidden, below the art and beauty that inspires me. Why must everything be so pretty all the time anyway? I don't want to pretend that the world is as magical as a Tim Walker editorial. I’d much rather make room for tears, warts and poverty.

COFFEE SHOP REVELATIONS

2009-03-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

Photo Credit: Troy Moth and me, in my best tutu and lumber jack shirt.

I suddenly realized that the only difference between today and yesterday is that today I get to choose all over again. In fact, beyond calendars and clocks, the sole physical evidence that today is in any way different from the day before, and the day before that is the changes I suddenly find on my body: A wrinkle, or a scar. How else would I know that days are actually passing, and not just repeating themselves? – Everyday made new like a movie one rewinds to watch over again, only to find it a little different each time. If at every passing second of my existence I hadn’t been brought up with the ticking of clocks branded onto my brain I would think we were living in an eternal present.There is no reality beyond today.

YOUR MANY FACES

2009-03-16T15:57:00.000-07:00

PC: Tim Walker
PC: Carl Bengtsson

Here's a riddle: What has an eternal multitude of parts but a single name?
I am. I am. I am.
You. You are. You are divided. Chop. Chop.
A million fragmented parts all contained within the small space of your body.
How do I know this? Because sometimes you say things and then wonder why you said them. Because a part of you can think about your thoughts and, like someone realizing they are dreaming, become something else entirely. Because a part of you remains unknowable, even after years of friendship...even to yourself. Because you are not the special things you can do, the unique things you like, or the beautiful things you own. You are a poem whose truth lies between the lines that draw the eye.

THINGS CHANGE

2009-03-16T09:36:00.000-07:00