Girl

When I come home from college, I face my past. The slowness of suburbia enwraps me like a blanket, comforting and suffocating me, all at once. My childhood bedroom is the same as I left it, a shrine filled with relics of my youth. My journals line my bookshelves; speckled composition notebooks filled with magazine clippings, stories, and my old English essays. There are pages upon pages detailing the countless hours spent aimlessly driving around the harbor at night, kissing boys in parking lots, climbing the roof of the old mansion, chugging vodka in basements, and throwing up on new t-shirts. Dancing at sweet sixteens, trudging through fluorescent halls, and crying on my beige-carpeted bedroom floor; reveling in conflicting waves of fear and hope for the future. “Girl”, is an exploration of the female experience growing up. It is a series of girls in their early 20’s in their bedrooms, along with their tattoos, diaries, and things collected over the years. I’ve become fascinated with the idea of innocence, and the series of events and that lead to a girl becoming a woman. Joan Didion once said, “One of the mixed blessings of being 20, and 21, and even 23, is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”