“Last year, most of my friends and I were exiting our high school phase into the idyllic post-adolescence of adulthood, which of course, is wrought with malaise, a perpetual confrontation with inadequacies as both artists and people, and ultimately, without proper guidance or assurance whatsoever. As we tried to come to terms with our new, “mature for our age” adult selves, I don’t think we could ignore that we ended up becoming even more like the high schoolers we wanted to be back then: we hung around each other’s houses until 3am watching movies and laughing, all the while knowing we had our typical jobs to run off to a few hours afterwards. We ran around our plastic suburbs and quaint valley towns taking goofy pictures until the hours became their dim, melancholic blue, and we drifted around the empty city streets in each other’s cars, watching the clementine lights whir by as we tried to set aside the malaise we were all secretly feeling.
There were of course, those rare, magical, moments of intimacy that happened every so often: One night Sequoia and I talked for hours around our valley town, right into the cusp of nightfall. We ended up at an abandoned baseball field across from her house, passing the camera around, taking pictures of each other, until finally all of our goofiness subsided for a few moments. The way she spoke, and how we both opened up all of these vulnerabilities and wounds in front of each other: she seemed so poetic, and even for as long as we were together that day, it seemed like she was still brimming with emotions and stories about her clouded past that she wanted to reveal to me.
There’s so few moments in my life where I can look at someone and feel completely astonished, in love, and grateful just to have this person in your life, let alone sitting beside you. Everything felt warm and full when I was around her.
In the end, I think that year was about dealing with this, intangible aimlessness, and a certain permeating dissatisfaction we had with ourselves. I hope that these pictures remind us that we were just slackers back then, trying to make the best of what we had.” – Brian Lau @zerkalou
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