*A thank you to Deets for unknowingly introducing me to the song that inspired this post.

I’m walking down the stairs of a building that I’ve known my whole life, a place I’ve known better in the past seven years than the previous 17. I feel strangely nostalgic, but this is no stranger of mine. I’ve felt this way before. I’ve been exactly here before.

I’m hit deep in my gut . I can feel a wave about to break and crash down forcing tears to surface. Tears that feel like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen—the dreamiest fall day where all the leaves in their changing colors sway because they have nowhere to be and all the time in the world.

It feels like loneliness and completeness together at the same time. I can see everywhere I’ve been and everywhere I’m headed, all the people I’ve loved and those I’ll love until the end of time. In this moment I think I feel loneliness, that I’m missing someone to know me through my life, who has been there most intimately as I’ve existed in one way, and with me again when I’ve grown into new skin. Who has known my thoughts and felt my feelings, who knows not just my present embodiment but the entangled sum of all the kinetic force that has brought me here. But this feeling, this craving to exist beyond myself with someone to defend its truth is the exact sense in which I feel complete.

I’m moving through this world, through the places that have held me and seen me through my most extraordinary and banal moments. The agnostic buildings, streets, steps, lights, and trees that have bore witness to my entire life existing before them, each day only slightly different from the last but each year unrecognizably new, just as the summer leaves change hour by hour, day by day, until you turn just in time to find them sleeping under a blanket of snow.

I’m alone in this moment, but how beautiful this life has been. The places we’ve called home who don’t think, feel, or know, but have undeniably been. Who have watched us grow, watched us love, watched us cry, watched us yearn, watched us laugh, watched us change. The places who have listened to the millions of words spoken between friends, family, and partners. Who have seen these words for what they really are—us, looking at each other, seeing each other, and sharing in love. So precious these moments have been. How incredible it is to be, if only just to feel the world pass through us. If we stop to feel, we can see the magic in the life within us—the life that has held us and hurt us, that has promised and betrayed us, that, in the end, is nothing more and nothing less than simply, us.

I’m walking down the stairs of a building that I’ve know my whole life. Here I am. Alone, but moving.

*35mm film photographs taken during my senior year of college, 2013.