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Summer taught me how to love on a deadline. Love and nostalgia shared the same mouth, spoke with the same familiar hum. If I focus my eyes I can remember: everything was orange. It’s an ugly color by itself, soured and rotten, so I didn’t love orange until I was in love, until I noticed it kissing clouds’ underbellies, draping over the towers of downtown Los Angeles, lighting up our tanned, grinning faces.

Orange isn’t beautiful until you tone down the opacity, until it’s fading into something else. You toned down those definitive edges that separated me from the rest of the world, and now I was a part of everything, I could feel the rhythm passing through me. You and I had melted into one another, like they’d fused us at the hip. And by they, I mean God, or love, or something. I hadn’t fallen in love with you but I had fallen in love with the place and time I met you in. I always seemed to be hopping in and out of these otherly places that left as quickly as they came. Almost like I was a time traveler. It felt magical enough to believe that.

If I could stitch the summer together, it would look just like the Urban Outfitters Rosalie Wallpaper Shower Curtain. Translucent and fluttering, adorned with patchworked florals, $44.00 plus tax. I would barely touch it, I wouldn’t want to leave a stain. I’d just hang it up, ring by ring, and watch it change the way the light poured through.

A love pulled from within oneself, remembering

how the sun never seemed to set. Nothing ever ends. And the whole summer played on a loop like one continuous laugh, forehead pressed to the restaurant table, forcing down smiles at the check-in desk and letting the joy bubble over.

And you’d step inside for a moment and loathe it all, the heat, the repetition, the suffocating steam. And suddenly you would stick your head back outside and the night air would run through you and the crickets are beeping and these great trees reach towards you and the lights are going out soon. And if you stand still and focus your eyes enough you can see the stars. And your image doesn’t reflect the same way in the mirror, like a second frame drawn over boiling linework. Strengthened muscles and a knowing in your eye.

process for my piece for @baovihnim’s limelight oc zine:) read the whole thing at the link below!

Was gonna post on instagram but then realized ai sucks, waiting to get my glaze acc up ^_^