Website | Galleries | Buy Prints | Facebook | Twitter | Email
I am a photographer, a student, and an all-around nerd who loves to travel, eat, and play with people's elbow skin. This blog is compiled of a combination of photography and random pieces of my life that I choose to launch into the great abyss known as the interwebz. I love what I do and love sharing my work so please feel
free to use that 'comments' button!
♥ Sarah
When I’ve got pent up feelings or emotions that need to be sorted through I find it therapeutic to write them down, almost as though I’m telling someone else’s story. I have many files in my computer of rantings such as this one, but I’m posting tonight out of curiosity. I wonder sometimes if anyone else does these strange things?
Today has been an off day. I’ve felt peculiar over the last few weeks, actually; my emotions feel spread thin and easily scraped away leaving me tired. While driving to and from Medford over the weekend I found myself suddenly caught by the beauty around me. Summer has slowly started to show itself in my portion of the world and having waited so long for it to arrive it seems more enchanting that I remember it. The colors are so vibrant – the brilliant yellow sun in a cloudless, vivid blue sky. The yellow-green color of leaves as the sun filters through them, a breeze lazily tugging at the branches. Little things that seem so perfect in their simple beauty it almost hurts to observe them.
Tonight I was driving home along the country roads. The horizon held little light and was tinted a faint, dark reddish-orange that faded to a deep blue, and I was suddenly overwhelmed. I pulled to the side of the road, killed the engine and my headlights and stabbed the button for my hazard lights. To my left the crescent moon was slung low on the western horizon, yellow as a sunflower and deepening in color as it slid towards the horizon. The outline of the mountains at the horizon was black against the darkening sky. They seemed so small in comparison to the vast space of fading light the stretched above them and me. The sky felt like a gaping mouth ready to swallow me up. In the distance, above the reservoir, tiny explosions of light began to pop and reflect over the water. They, too, seemed low to the ground though I knew they weren’t. I rolled my window down and angled myself to sit and watch the fireworks flare along the horizon. The key was still in the ignition keeping my car battery on and my music was so loud I could feel its slow rhythm vibrate through the car and my body. My hazard lights clicked in time, illuminating the tall grass on the side of the road a deep orange to match the falling moon. Stars began to prick to life and I watched the slow, steady progression of a satellite as it glided effortlessly above my head. Tiny headlights from the highway below winked at me and again I felt it was all so painfully simple and beautiful.
As time slipped by old pains began to rise rebelliously in my mind. I turned them over and over in my head, examining them numbly. Our lives are never how we saw them when we were young, I thought. I allowed myself a moment of vulnerability and let it all wash over me in a wave of silly emotions. I say “silly” because I think of my life and compare it to the lives of so many others and I think I don’t deserve to feel what I’m feeling – my life is a good life.
I pulled back onto the road once the moon had reached the mountains and headed back into town with my windows rolled town, breathing in the scent of hay and still-warm pavement. Fireworks continued to burst randomly in the sky, getting larger as I neared town. I pulled into my parking space at home and stepped out. A huge firework burst in the sky above me, assaulting my senses with its brilliant flash of light and the deep, bass-tone boom that I could feel in my chest.
As I stepped inside, welcomed by my purring cat, I likened fireworks to life. The night sky is steady and predictable in its path above our heads, but every once in awhile it’s interrupted by a blast of color and sound that throws things out of perspective. Painful experiences are the same way; they leave us bewildered, and even when the experience is gone we can still feel its lingering effects, like the flash of a firework embedded into our eyelids, still visible after the sky returns to blackness.
I feel better now. I have a single lamp lit and am listening to the fireworks pop through my open window, my slightly-nervous cat in my lap. When I cannot find comfort in those around me I seek solitude and try to work it out myself. I needed to be alone tonight. As pathetic as it sounds I took great comfort in watching celebration break out all around me as I sat alone with the blinking hazard lights, and the popping fireworks, and the stars and the satellites and the baleful yellow moon.
