There's something about looking at old photos of myself, when I was a little tyke, that makes me feel like I'm on some weird self discovery trip. It's strange to look at yourself so young, when you were hardly really a person at all, and comparing it to who you are now. How have I changed in the past 12+ years? How did I grow and change and become someone different right under my nose. Every picture feels like a little piece of a puzzle to show me who I am and how to keep growing. They show that there was a time before bad things happened. Back when the small things in life were life, and I regret to say things that I forgot about for so long. We forget and overlook so many things that we did when were younger that it feels like a part of us goes missing and we can't remember where or when we lost it or how to get it back.

The Virgin Suicides has always transported me to an untouchable time and place. A place where happiness and sadness were not oil and water but different water colors that bleed together to make a whole new world and spectrum. This is the first time I've realized that those two emotions can go hand in hand. Aren't they the strongest feelings? The ones felt most often? Ones that can tug and pull us in so many directions and deliver us into realms we didn't even know were made possible. I think being able to feel happiness and sadness as a whole makes us human. I used to think you could only be at one point in the rainbow spectrum of feeling and emotions, however I'm now lucky enough to know that there really is no fixed point in life. Things cannot be explained or felt as easily as we thought. Emotions are a kaleidoscope of colors hitting us in different places at the same time or not hitting us at all. They blind us. We can't even see how beautiful they look displayed on us.