My life in photographs

Here are some photographs from my August – the month where the sunsets are golden and spirited like a poem about love. I had a relatively happy August, some moments of sadness sunk into my bones, but nothing like the sadness I feel today. I don't know what happens to me when the seasons change but suddenly I turn into a turtle without its shell. I start wondering too much and feeling like my home is not where I am. I start looking through windowsills as if they are windows to a faraway world, a world I cannot touch or belong to.

Maybe I feel this way because summer is just another word for promises. When the calendar turns from August to September, you start to remember all of the dreams and plans you made for your summer, but you feel as if you were only chasing the tail of a wild hound. Summer puts on running shoes and before you can fulfil the desire of following dandelion orbs, going on picnics, blowing bubbles and sharing peach sangria with all of your friends, summer comes to an end.
If I could only slow the season down, maybe let the warmth sink into my autumn air, but it is a feeling not the weather that I dread. I know this is true because when I look outside, it still appears like a hot summers day. There is no snow, the sun soaks our windowsill and rosy cheeks are given to those who step outside. I have no reason to believe autumn is here, except for the name at the top of our calendar.

I have the end of season blues. I have the I wish I did more, I wish I could cut the laces of summer and wear it out a little longer blues. I've been fighting these blues since I was a small girl. I can remember sitting on the wooden fence in our front yard, school was beginning in two weeks time and I was covered in dirt. The rays from a summery sun hit my cheeks in the most peculiar way, it was as if they were robbing a kiss from me or saying goodbye. I began to weep and suddenly felt the kind of dread you feel when you're about to get sick in a car during rush hour traffic. I didn't want summer to end – not then and not now.

As I sit here mourning the end of a season, I tell myself to find something positive for me to lean on, anything to make me feel whole again. I know I could become a slave to my sad mood and never see the beauty in living for today but I wasn't born to be hopeless. I was born to live in winter, in spring, in light and in darkness. I may always crave summer and dream of its arrival, but I am living and breathing in every season, even the ones wherein flowers do not grow. I look outside and the sunset is golden and spirited, the same kind of love poem I saw in the skyline on an August night even though it is September.
Tomorrow I will be ocean bound. My family awaits me on Vancouver Island. How could I sit on top of a wooden fence and cry for the freedom that summer brings when I am ocean bound? Here's to my bountiful love of summer and learning how to plant joy in every other season. I hope your world is bright.
(For detailed descriptions of these photographs, you can find them on my instagram!)