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.
The fear of presently, or inevitably, living an unsatisfying and unfulfilling life, leads people away from their homes, from the people and places that are genuinely precious, in search of something intangible and ultimately, unconvincing.
In hopes of finding the “fullness,” I photographed the people and the places most precious to me over the course of a year in my town. I noticed that the colors seemed brighter, the air warmer, the fog harboring even more mystery, and the people more content, despite the meagerness of it all. I don’t want to look to the future to fix everything, I just want to know the “fullness” and the depths of what’s here, already around me.
words and photography by Zerkalou
zerkalou.com/a-new-hope
Instagram.com/zerkalou
