Bright, Burning, Red

Pants: Street Shop in Spain 

Bandeau: Charlotte Russe 

Headband: Primark 

Loafers: Urban Outfitters

Robot Ring: Love Culture 

Flower Ring: Charlotte Russe 

Bracelets: DIY 

My friend Michelle is back in town, so we took advantage of both our presences and went on a photo adventure. We snapped a bunch of photos around the beach, got creeped on by hometown creepers (They are quite relentless, let me just tell you.), laughed over memories of our foolish teenage antics, and talked. A lot. We talked about life, being young adults, and love. Mostly about love and how we both don't really know what love is at age 21 and 22. I, personally, don't know if I believe in love, but that's a story for another time. We reminisced quite a bit about our respective young 'loves'. The crazy love. The one you just jump into without even thinking. The one that drives you crazy but, for some inexplicable reason, you can't stay away. The one full of tears and laughter and screaming and talking until 5 AM. The one you hate to love because the person is just no good. The one you can't control. The one you don't understand. The one that never worked out, but never fully ended. The one you can't forget. 

What I don't understand is how that can just crash and burn when the feelings were so strong. You compare the guy to every other dude you meet and none of them compare. You travel around the world, but coming home always floods you with the same old haunts. Because you just made too many memories in such a small town. You can't escape, but somehow it never works out between you two. It's just almosts after almosts and you can't wait for such unreliability, but at the same time, you can't seem to move on completely. How does this exist? If someone can explain this to me, you should write a book. Maybe it's just a bunch of delusional thoughts floating around— sculpting the person into what you want/expect instead of seeing the real. But what is real? 

Anyways, this is too blubbery so I'm going to place a T Swift quote into this little white box. I am not a fan of her and I'm a bit upset that I connected so much to words she wrote because (before reading the prologue to her Red album) I thought she was immature, airing out her dirty laundry into her lyrics, but these words really resonated with me: 

"There's an old poem by Neruda that I've always been captivated by, and one of the lines in it has stuck with me ever since the first time I read it. It says ''love is so short, forgetting is so long.'' It's a line I've related to in my saddest moments, when I needed to know someone else had felt that exact same way. And when we're trying to move on, the moments we always go back to aren't the mundane ones. They are the moments you saw sparks that weren't really there, felt stars aligning without having any proof, saw your future before it happened, and then saw it slip away without any warning. These are moments of newfound hope, extreme joy, intense passion, wishful thinking, and in some cases, the unthinkable letdown. And in my mind, every one of these memories looks the same to me. I see all of these moments in bright, burning, red.

My experiences in love have taught me difficult lessons, especially my experiences with crazy love. The red relationships. The ones that went from zero to a hundred miles per hour and then hit a wall and exploded. And it was awful. And ridiculous. And desperate. And thrilling. And when the dust settled, it was something I'd never take back. Because there is something to be said for being young and needing someone so badly, you jump in head first without looking. And there's something to be learned from waiting all day for a train that's never coming. And there's something to be proud of about moving on and realizing that real love shines golden like starlight, and doesn't fade or spontaneously combust. Maybe I'll write a whole album about that kind of love if I ever find it. But this album is about the other kinds of love that I've recently fallen in and out of. Love that was treacherous, sad, beautiful, and tragic. But most of all, this record is about love that was red."

And with that, here is a cover of Red that I've had on repeat these past couple of days. 

"Do you realize that we are going to grow old with Taylor Swift? When she was 15, we were 15. She's 22 and we're 22."-Michelle

"Lord help us."-Me