these photos have been sitting here for a very long time. far longer than they’re supposed to.

like the clothes on my bed and the books on my floor. all waiting to be sorted so i can start packing already.

but that’s the thing with leaving. i hate packing. more so when you’re leaving with no idea of when you’re coming back. so you wanna take as much of your old belongings with you to remind you of home. probably just as much as you wanna postpone the whole packing business to some inconvenient time where there’s no room left for sentimentality. say, a day or two before the trip.

yes, i’m leaving. in exactly 12 days, i will be flying to melbourne to be with jeff and to start another chapter of my life with him where new adventures and a whole lot of photoshoots await. it’s exciting and scary at the same time but i know i’m in good hands.

the day i received my visa, i was so happy i could cry. funny enough, two seconds later, i was literally crying. like, full on. the thought of leaving all the people i love behind and not knowing when i’d see them again made me bawl. you should have seen me as my sister saw me when i barged into her room. i probably looked like a borderline nutcase in the process of entirely losing her mind. i mean, when you’re feeling both extremes of the emotional spectrum at the same time, how much crazier can you get?

at 2am, i was dialing jeff on viber. not for a booty call, but for an emergency crisis intervention. practically begging him to tell me everything’s gonna be fine. not with me (because i know i’m gonna be okay), but with the people i’m gonna leave behind. my parents, most especially.

and like a true shrink with the soothing talents of a pastor, he offered me words of comfort that i know i’m gonna remember forever. about how, someday, technology would be so advanced that i can communicate with my loved ones here through a special helmet that would allow me to see and talk to them real-time.

“kind of like how Professor X communicates with the x-men?” i asked tearfully.

“yes! but even better because there would also be robots…” he went on and on.

i didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

so once again, i did both. which made me feel even crazier. but the happier kind of crazy, i guess. just knowing that somehow, someone’s got my back. (even if that someone’s idea of “words of comfort” involves words such as “aliens” and “robots” and some other stuff that science fiction is made of. lol. i appreciate the effort though, jeffy. haha.)

the special helmets and robots might take a while before they become mainstream. for now, let me just post these pictures as a remembrance of the happy times last summer. (and also to move on from this backlog!)

p.s. pardon the vanity poses. obviously, that’s what happens when you have a photographer boyfriend.