A few months ago a friend told me that my writing and photography felt like, “catching the middle of a story, without a beginning or an end, the whole world existed for those characters and she was getting a slice of it” At the time I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by this, I knew it was a compliment but I didn’t fully understand how. It stayed with me though, hovering in the back of my mind as a question mark, until last week when I saw a pickup truck driving along a tree-lined road that reminded me of Europe. Something about the angle from where I was seeing it and the movement of our cars, me driving towards them while they pulled further away, evoked a heavy feeling of nostalgia and I wanted to write a story about all the lives attached to it. Where were they going, what had they come from, what was the whole picture? As these thoughts started racing around my head, vying for attention, the scene suddenly began to feel heavy and clunky, a chore, and I realized that I was happier with how it felt in that short period, I didn’t always need to know what came before or after, the scene was allowed to be whole in that one moment. I finally understood what my friend was talking about. Later on that night I relayed this journey of mine to her and after her initial surprise that what she said had stayed with me she went on to say, “Context can become a burden. With glimpse’s of a story you give people, who are experiencing your work, the freedom to interpret it themselves, how it makes them feel, and how they can attach their story to it themselves ” I have always known I like to greedily grab at life, each passing second has its own unique story, but how we see it is up to us. The photos here are some that I caught from my life in 2024. They each have their own stories, but those are mine, what stories you feel and see will be yours.