m.y. exhalation: Chapter One

While performing my daily ritual of browsing through my bookmarked style blogs, I came across a blurb from one of the first essays I ever read in college. It was Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle, an essay assigned to us from an Best American Essays anthology. I didn't think much of it back then, but after stumbling upon it again, it's given me a lot of food for thought. It's this particular paragraph that really hits home:

"When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."

God, do I love that paragraph. I mean, whoa. The images he conjures up are incredible. It almost hurts to think about them. And I'm not exactly sure why I decided to start my blog in this particularly somber tone, but I somehow find some reassurance in his words. Life is supposed to hurt. If it didn't, everything good in our lives would therefore be meaningless, right?

On an ENTIRELY different note, here are some things that are currently piquing my interests -- in fashion, music, food, etc. Basically, the summation of my life!

1. Everything Coco Rocha-related.