breathing air forgotten since

Sometimes I just lose touch, forget to update, forget to keep track in the virtual place that I will look back on later. And I also forget to be present in moments, get caught up in tasks, in normal days that will fade and become gilded with gold when I look back at the memories.

But here are some tangible memories from last year, when we spent months on end living in Notting Hill, feeling the ache of cold floors in our bones, getting to know the people of Portobello Road and naming them as our friends.

you know when you come home

I visited my parents for an extended period last summer, and when I returned to my home and community life, I felt the oddest whispers of nostalgia as we were doing things that I thought I would remember forever.

But I developed this roll of film yesterday and found the photographs that I took over the past year, and I realised I'd forgotten so many of these moments.

I must be living a life where timeless has a new meaning, where moments that define home and hope and safety are becoming commonplace for me. There are still things I yearn for, and it is good to have dreams, but there is also such peace in knowing that there is home.

the voices in the morning

There are voices I love to hear in the morning, and fall asleep to as they murmur along with the constant London rain, my family across the ocean. There aren't words to describe the way these fingers and toes and livers and spleens have wriggled their way into my heart.

my hidden quiet

I have lived in this house for over a year now, longer than any house since I "came of age," and the corners of it have become so much a home that I cannot even fathom returning to the country of my birth and having to let go of my favourite place to rest my bones.

the pristine quiet

it was almost a cliche, plumbing the depths of my past in an all white house, with space and quiet and tears, and the sharp tongue of anger that I had hidden from for so long, but there was a freedom, too, in the quiet of the summer, in the hush of freedom.

fresh breaths

In the exact moment that I needed a fresh breath, an escape, my best friend's parents claimed me as their own and whisked me away to a city stuck in time, streets I'd read about, a day without having to face the pain.

(Bath, UK, and London, England)

the times between

the times between were the growing times,
when we woke up to snow and still traveled north,
when we waited on Westminster Bridge for the turn of the year,
when I learned to be loved and to love more than I ever had before.

lost hands to hold

after five solid months together, in the middle of November, we returned to London and realised that our breaths together were numbered, so we grasped at them with grabby hands until they were gone.