bridgeport snapshot

Me + P at Bridgeport. It was shut down for restorations but we stopped for a quick photo anyway. My favorite so far.

hitting the road

On our way north to spend the holiday weekend with P's family... Eep!

this terror and this beauty

The choice to love, to really love, is incredibly, ridiculously brave.

It is not a surrendering of self but rather, a time when you scramble a bit to find your footing, and then you stand in your own power and look the Vast Beast in the eye and say, “I choose this.” I choose this thing that can both protect me and tear me apart; that can and will bring me my most enthralling joys and my most excruciating and unanticipated pain. I choose the risk. I choose the possibility of endings. I choose to be as simpatico as old souls and to be equally, heartrendingly misunderstood. I choose to be at intervals rashly taken advantage of and unexpectedly worshiped. I choose this terror and this beauty. I choose love.


Rachelle Mee-Chapman, Magpie Girl

like you wanna be loved

my best friend's wedding

capture, release

I went over the list, saved it on my computer. Read it again, closed it again. I am an avid photographer, like it or not; I could have completed the project easily enough. But in the end I didn't feel compelled to. It might have helped, early on. But grief is not something I want to capture, anymore. Those particular relics are not what I want to keep.

I am still the face. I have been captured by grief -- and then, without quite knowing the exact moment that it happened -- released. And I find I am able to return that favor, finally. And I am pleased, and pensive, and content.

we learn nothing

We think of color blindness as a defect, but it enables those afflicted with it to see through camouflage.

Tim Kreider

never have I ever

He has said it to my back, in passing, or maybe into my hair. Quietly, experimentally; softly enough as to be easily missed. And I have missed it, intentionally, a few times before. But this morning when he said it, standing there in the bathroom, half shaven, kissing me goodbye, he was so sincere and adorable and I felt so happy my fears weren't big enough to stop me anymore. I grabbed his face with both hands and looked him straight in the eye and I said it too. The first time I've said it to him or to anyone: I love you.

And oh, I do.

st carmel

1. St Carmel monastery 2. P in the olive grove 3. Self portrait
4. Brave rose undimmed by blight 5. Photo of me under the arbor by P