Crossover.
This was the year I chose to challenge myself by stepping out from behind the camera and into the frame. What began as observation became participation; the photographer became the subject. Using my face as the foundation, I confronted realities that exist both personally and socially, subjects that are often avoided because they are uncomfortable, complicated, or easier to ignore. By placing myself at the center, I allowed vulnerability to replace distance, accepting exposure as part of the process. This is not about self-portraiture alone, but about crossing the threshold where looking is no longer enough, and being seen becomes necessary.
i’m not queer, i’m disembodied
This follows with a question I can’t escape: Do I want this person, or do I want to be this person? The line between wanting and self-erasure blurs until I’m lost in it. Each stitch on my face is an attempt to patch myself up, yet with every thread, I feel myself unraveling—held together by fragile seams, torn apart by my own hands. Identity feels like a borrowed thing, stitched together from fragments of others—longing, admiration, and self-doubt, each piece as fragile as the last. I exist in this shaky in between, suspended between becoming and vanishing, never fully whole, never fully me. I exist in this space where wanting, becoming, and losing are tangled together, a never-ending cycle of shaping myself only to watch myself slip away.
why am i so scared to fall in love
I exist in black and white—a reflection of both the world around me and my fear of falling in love. A fear shaped not just by personal vulnerability but by a society that tells me love is something to be afraid of. As anti-gay laws multiply, we are forced back into the shadows, made to feel that love is dangerous again, as if we are unworthy of being seen. The absence of color mirrors that reality—a world that dictates who we can be, who we can love, and which parts of ourselves must remain hidden. But the glowing red veins on one side of my face tell another story. My love is not invisible; you can’t erase something that was never meant to be hidden. No matter how much the world tries to suppress it, love refuses to disappear. But still, the fear lingers, the fear of being seen, the fear that history is repeating itself.
How can love be a sin?
The Ice That Burns
Like a shadow in winter, memory lingers, frozen and unyielding, refusing to let go what was long after it’s gone. Every moment, every love, every loss, it preserves what was, keeping it untouched and suspended in time, unwilling to allow it to fade. Fire is movement. It does not ask if we are ready; it devours everything we thought we could hold onto, leaving only ashes behind. It shatters our illusions and forces change when we least expect it. Do we remain frozen in the past, or do we let the fire consume us, risking everything for the chance to become something more?
Not A Day Goes By
Turning 25 feels like waking up inside a body that remembers every version of me I’ve ever been.
Standing in a room full of mirrors—each one showing a different reflection: the child who dreamed, the teen who disappeared, the adult still learning how to hold both. The gold drips like a memory, tainted with expectation and fear. I wore it like a crown, because being golden meant being seen. But this portrait is not about loss—it’s about revelation. Turning 25 is not an ending. It’s an opening. A slow return to the self I buried to be loved.
Not a day goes by that I don’t carry it all.
Taking Chances
Every time I love, I risk not just heartbreak, but losing pieces of who I am. This is what the hope of love costs me. The roses blooming from me are what grow when I let myself believe in love. Each petal opens a confession, a whispered hope that maybe this love will stay. But the thorns remind me that love can hurt in ways no one understands. Even when it begins as a dream, it can still leave a scar. The petals falling? They are the pieces of me that leave every time love doesn’t stay—fragments of trust, hope, and the parts of my heart I thought were safe. I don’t fear the pain, I fear the part of me that will fade away each time someone can’t love me back.
If I Were A Boy
Before I ever learned to love myself, I learned how to apologize for who I was. The chains across my face every “sorry” I gave to make others comfortable-each moment I hid to silence myself. I wasn’t born with chains, the world built them around me. If I were a boy, the kind the world wanted, maybe I wouldn’t have had to trade pieces of myself just to feel safe. But even beneath the chains, I survived. The rainbow blooming is the truth they couldn’t erase. If I were a boy, maybe I wouldn’t have to apologize for the way I love or who I choose to be.
Land of the Free
This is the land that taught me to love myself and hate myself at the same time. I was raised on words like freedom, justice, and equality — but learned early that those promises come with conditions. That some kinds of love are still seen as threats. I’ve spent years trying to hold both: the love I have for this country, and the way it has tried to erase me. The pride I carry, and the shame I was taught. The freedom I was promised, and the fear I’ve lived through. I was raised beneath a flag that taught me how to disappear with a smile. How to say “I’m proud” while still looking over my shoulder. The flag that flies above us was built from ideals: valor, purity, justice. But what do those words mean when you grow up being told your love is shameful? What is justice when it never arrives for people like me? What is purity when it erases everything true about who I am? I’ve carried this contradiction for years — to be proud of who I am and afraid of who might see it.
Land of the Free is what they call it, and maybe one day it will be.
But right now, for people like me, it’s a contradiction I carry in my body — the longing to belong to a place that still struggles to belong to me.
Silent Star
I shine in silence, as if the universe forgot about me. Inside my chest, stars burn quietly, waiting to be seen, but their glow belongs only to me. I carry infinity in my veins, yet it feels like exile. To be a universe is to be vast, and to be vast is to be abandoned. Sometimes I wonder if I was meant to be distant—if my body was built for orbit, always out of reach. Maybe this is how stars really die—not in fire, but in being unseen. I am a constellation only I can see, and sometimes I wonder if even I still believe in my own light.
The Man I’ll Never Reach
When I was a kid, I was told to imagine the best version of myself, the person I was always meant to become. I built him from fragments of dreams—a version of me untouched by fear, unbroken, fearless, a heroic reflection of who I wanted to be. He has followed me ever since, not as a companion, but as a ghost. The years pass, and I chase him, yet the closer I reach, the further he slips away, dissolving deeper into the dark, becoming more memory than possibility. Every day, every month, every year of my life, I realize I will never become him. That truth haunts me—but it also saves me. His absence carves a purpose into my life, and it is in the endless distance between us that I find the reason to keep chasing.
I Choose To Take Off My Mask
There’s a moment, just before the mask tears, when you can feel it breathing, like it doesn’t want to let go. I’ve lived inside that moment for years, caught between the comfort of hiding and the terror of being seen. The mask has learned the shape of my face, it clings like second skin, whispering that it’s safer to stay covered. On Halloween, the world puts on faces, I peel mine away. What happens when I stop hiding, when everyone else becomes someone else, I strip away what I’ve built to survive. This isn’t about transformation, it’s a slow autospy of identity, performed in reverse. The tension is the body trying to heal from the truth, it becomes afriad of what I’ll become without it. Honesty is what haunts you long after the mask is gone.
Remember Me
The human mind can erase you long before time ever has the chance to. What terrifies me isn’t just being forgotten by one person, its the realization that forgetting is the destiny of everyone. One day, every person who ever knew my name will be gone. One day, my name will be spoken for the last time. One day, the final person who remembers me will forget. After that, I will exist nowhere except in the dust of moments that once matterred. Every trace of me will vanish into the same silence that swallowed millions before me. At what point did I stop existing in your mind, even as I stood right in front of you?
If Only
There is a moment when you realize time will not wait for you. The kind that forms when you understand how long you assumed there would be more. Another year has passed and another version of yourself is further away. Another reminder that life keeps repeating its gestures while your margin for error narrows. I notice how time presses in during moments of stillness. I think about who I was at the beginning of the year and how unfamiliar that person already feels. The distance between who you were and who you thought you’d become grows harder to explain. I think about the things I assumed I’d still have time for.
If only realizing didn’t feel like an autopsy.