the Great California-to-New York-With-Lots-of-Friend-Detours Road Trip of 2025♥️
My heart will sooner still before my brain stops teeming with the memory of every square inch of this land.
And yet my heart will never cease beating over every ounce of love we were given along the way.
So I suppose I live the rest of my very long life in dedication to this magical trip.
I walked the stage in early June, surrounded and overwhelmed by love and attention. It was one of those moments where the idea of the thing overtook the actuality of the moment: fidgeting with the weirdest hat I’ll ever wear, worried about social politics, remembering to pose (AND NOT TRIP), and two hours of pomp and circumstance sizzling a sunburn into my cheeks. It felt like a strange end to the exhaustion of balancing passion and obligation.
But this meant a finishing of obligations (for the most part), and it meant I was able to follow passion on a series of acecapades. I threw myself into Starboy edits and casting giddily into the future with utterances of “feature length” and “whatever we want”; egged on by my creative twin flame, Jay.
Then, I escaped to a childhood home in San Francisco, not mine, but beginning to be. From this house’s windows and doors, a familiar wave of love and appreciation lifts me, I am allowed to be a child again.
I treasure the moments of teeth-gritting, howling, unencumbered joy- my body is part of my mind again, and the pains and anxieties of age are left on the shore with my shoes. You’re beckoning to me, curling the rapids, and I remember ‘we’ get to exist, instead of ‘you’ and ‘i’.
I treasure the places that provoke those moments: that childhood home, the fields of my parent’s farm, the stone giants and riverbeds of Yosemite.
After all of this glee, Goodchange showed up at my door, with her heavy shoes and laden bags, and reminded me how good pain can be. I cried a lot, in the cafe, around the fire pit, in the car on the way back from Goodwill, and finally in Leo’s arms, standing in the empty apartment, that was somehow smaller without everything in it.
Graduation, Yosemite, Friends, Moving.
For a whole month, everything was in shades of green, golden, and blue.
three years of this(falling asleep on call, distance chess, reading to each other, meticulously crafted envelopes and letters) & that (taking thousands of photos, the flowers you wrap into my necklace, magazine cutouts we saved for each other, and nights that we find ourselves running out of time before we run out of words)
here’s to more of this & that in the future:
we are adventurers exploring the universe hand in hand, discovering fourth dimensions to love, faith, nature. our hearts are a two-part flashlight, the bulb and batteries, and the world lights up when we’re together.
tldr: I LOVE LEO SOOOO MUCH (FOR THREE YRS) !
