Respire
THE NAME RESPIRE CAME FROM THE NOTION THAT ART AND FASHION CONSTITUTE THE air that
we
IS
THE CASE, THE CREATIVES
AROUND
YOU ACT AS THE LUNGS, FEEDING LIFE-GIVING OXYGEN TO YOUR POUNDING HEART.
Intimacy
a feeling of closeness and connection in a relationship
Letter From the Editor
When I applied to fashion school, I wrote my essay on my life in the mundane Midwest and my journey striving to reach the technicolor land of Oz. In my teenage mind, Oz could be no place other than Manhattan. A few years later, like Dorothy in the hot air balloon, I found myself in a U-Haul on my way back home. I had gained heart, courage, brains, and the assurance that there is actually no place like home.
With a few clicks of my heels, I found myself tasked with the ever exciting job of piecing together my sense of self and my life’s purpose outside of my childhood fantasies. What fun! I was no longer the girl I had identified with for the past decade of my life, and that was a hard reckoning. Somewhere along the way, I had abandoned unbridled ambition and youthful zeal for quiet peace and community. I had made best friends for life in New York, but I knew an abundance of love was calling me back to Missouri.
When navigating the slums of post-grad life, the love of my friends, the wisdom of my family, the magic of my relationship, and the trust in myself carried me through. The defining word of the year for me was intimacy, and there is nothing else I could imagine highlighting in this issue.
Inspired by bell hooks, I knew that we had to celebrate the many forms of intimacy that weave in and out of our lives. I moved back into my childhood bedroom, and have felt the suffocating love of my parents. I needed to honor familial intimacy. I fell in love for the first time with someone who fills my life with laughter and magic. I needed to honor romantic intimacy. I returned to my childhood best friends, and navigated the woes of adulthood with them by my side. I needed to honor platonic intimacy. And more than anything, I came home to myself. I finally met the new Kylie, and became her best friend. I needed to honor personal intimacy.
In times of peril and dread, caring for one another, pouring yourself into community, and fighting for the relationships in your life will create a spark that will ripple into the world around you. Ambition and discomfort can push us forward. But first, deep and fearless connection will open your heart to new worlds of meaning and understanding. You can imagine endless empires and universes for yourself, as teenage Kylie once did, but you will quickly learn that you must start with love.
With love,
Kylie Hull, Creative Director and Editor-in-Chief
Bridget McGinn, Photographer
PersonalIntimacy
Therapy, meditation, journaling, oh my! Knowing and caring for yourself is daunting in a world that pushes you to do the opposite. Scrolling through hundreds of influencers, living in a constant state of escapism, centering self deprecation in every joke… our generation has our work cut out for us. While intimate relationships with partners, friends, and family require work and patience, there is no doubt in my mind that forming an intimate relationship with yourself is the most taxing quest of all.
The act of caring for yourself is both gentle and radical. It requires patience and compassion in abundance. You must lead with a softness of heart, as if parenting a small child. It also requires discomfort and reconstruction. You must lead with ardor and bravery, as if toppling a great empire.
When I was four years old, I was an artistic, loud, colorful, rambunctious, sensitive, emotional, and inquisitive child. Despite the molding and conditioning from the outside world for the past two decades, these features still slip through in everything I do.
Visit the four year old inside of you. How can you nurture, explore, and honor them in your adult life? What practices can you implement to uplift and protect them? Whether it’s planting your feet in the grass or setting boundaries with external forces, there are endless ways to show up for yourself every day.
At its core, our capitalistic society creates a state of constant lack and panic. Feeling like you could always do more and be more is essential to sustain a consumer economy and a nation of obedient workers.
Who you are when you first open your eyes in the morning is enough. Who you are when you are bathing, feeding, holding, and uplifting yourself is enough.
The relationship that you have with yourself is world building and life altering. It will dictate who you show up as in all your other relationships. It will determine what dreams you allow yourself to chase. It will heal wounds you didn’t know were there. It is never too late to get to know yourself.
“Who you are when you first open your eyes in the morning is enough. Who you are when you are bathing, feeding, holding, and uplifting yourself is enough.”
a conversation with abbie leonard
& kylie & bridget
When thinking about personal intimacy and the act of showing up for yourself in an abundance of ways, my mind immediately went to Abbie. Some of the words that have most shaped how I strive to treat and view myself have come from her, whether through conversation or passed down wisdom she’s shared with Bridget.
A New York native who has set roots in St. Louis, she has exemplified the power of an intentional, communal life. At her core, she is someone who cares deeply for herself and others. I am amazed by her commitment to knowing and uplifting herself. In an often hard and discouraging world, we could all take a page from her book.
First, what is one thing that you love the most about yourself? We should all go around and say this.
A: I love how thoughtful I am. I try to be attuned to the people around me. Sometimes that can come back to bite me if it’s a form of people pleasing, but I do like that about myself. Actually, I love it.
B: I love how I see the beauty in the mundane.
K: I would say that’s also my favorite thing. I think that’s something that all of us have. I like how emotional I am. Sometimes it feels bad, but I would rather be that way than feel nothing.
A: Reeeallll. Sensitivity is a sign of life.
You’re a very levelheaded and thoughtful person. Is this something you’ve always had or have you consciously built it up?
A: It’s something you have to practice every day. It’s easier to control the response to negative thought loops than to control the thought itself. Life is always going to throw random things at you. The skill is to be able to control your reaction.
It’s the balance of letting yourself feel an emotion and not hardening yourself -leaning in and crying and laughing and being really touched by thingsbut then also being able to temper your response to negative thoughts.
So in the moment, how do you ground yourself and handle the response?
A: The first step is letting yourself feel the emotion. There is a distinction between feeling it and intellectualizing it. Don’t allow it to take up too much of your brain space. I focus on what the feeling is telling me about myself. What is the takeaway? How can it teach me to be a better friend, a better daughter?
In terms of grounding in the moment: being present in my body, writing the feeling down, talking it out to a voice note or a friend. Separating it from an internal thing and making it an external thing is helpful for me because I’m a processor. Letting it come, but then letting it go.
K: I have things that ground me in my everyday life when I am doing well. But I need to learn how to turn to them in times of panic.
A: Yeah but for me a lot of mental health should be proactive. Sometimes I’ll only journal or do certain things when I’m going through it. You should be doing those things in your day to day so you can manage your emotions a bit more. Mental health is treated like a response rather than just integrating in ways to take care of yourself every day.
I love your neutrality with your appearance and your ability to remain grounded despite the world around us. A lot of women fall into negative patterns.
A: I remind myself of the quote, “My body is the least interesting thing about me.” And the Maya Angelou quote, “People will forget what you said, and forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” I extend that to physical appearance. When I think about the people that I love, it’s always for qualities that are non-physical.
I also try not to say things out loud. It’s so easy to have negative thoughts about an insecurity. But then I think, “Okay, and.. who cares?” Focus on how to morph the thoughts into something more positive and productive.
K: Ever since Bridget told me how you try not to say it out loud, I have been thinking about that in my day to day life.
A: When someone else says it, it’s a bit jarring. With negative or insecure thoughts, I would never say that to Bridget about her. And I should be just as horrified at Bridget saying it to herself.
K: From a young age, humor and banter and casual comments have always been surrounding self deprecation. It’s so normalized to talk about how we look.
A: It’s how we bond. I’ve seen girls and women who try to love themselves and say positive things, and other people take offense to that. We should all be telling ourselves that we look hot and sexy and amazing, and that we are the smartest girls and that we are going to change the world. Because we are.
K: We want our partners or friends to compliment us, but we could be doing that for ourselves every day. We don’t have to wait for somebody else to do it for us.
A: Exactly. Someone can tell you you’re pretty every day, but you’re not going to believe it until it comes from inside. How you act toward yourself everyday is what becomes your self image and your life. Thinking about the younger me or older me, or young girls, and not wanting them to speak that way... and seeing that everyone is so beautiful and amazing and just focusing on that beauty.
B: I don’t know many 25 year olds that have two close friends above the age of 40. I wonder how that plays a role in how you have learned more about yourself.
A: It just gives you more perspective. There’s just more to life than how you look.
You were talking about your favorite thing about yourself is seeing beauty. So it’s also hard to detach that narrative of beauty from the physicality of it. But then I think about the ugliest things I’ve ever seen and they’re still so beautiful. So it really is all about perspective. Even if I look ugly as fuck, I’m beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And everything is beautiful because everything is romantic.
And last thing I’ll say, for people that really care about you, being positive about yourself is never going to be a threat. Conversely, bonding with people over negative, self deprecating comments is not very genuine.
K: Bridget and I decided if we catch each other talking badly about ourselves or about other people, we will stop each other. It’s so hard because women really do bond over not liking themselves. It feels like a safe space, but it becomes enabling. If I were to come to her and say, “Ugh I feel so ugly today,” and she didn’t entertain it, it would be jarring to be held accountable. We are so used to our friendships coddling our behaviors.
A: And I think in those moments instead of being like, “Nooo you’re so pretty,” we need to start being like, “Okay and… who the fuck cares? Like so what.”
B: Constantly seeking reassurance from the people around you on your physical attributes does nothing. But if you were to be like, “Am I a good friend?” that’s a much more productive way to seek validation.
K: If we put all of the energy we put into our appearance into bettering ourselves or our lives, we would be so much further ahead in so many ways.
A: And with seeking reassurance, it has to come from within. You can’t rely on your friends to tell you you look good. Like okay, I can feel not great about myself today but it’s okay and we forge on.
B: And it removes us from our community. It makes us so centered on how we look that it draws us out of necessary things.
A: Literally Jemima Jo Kirke, “I think you guys are thinking about yourselves a little too much.”
K: I would go out with my friends and if I felt insecure about the way I looked, I wasn’t present in the moment. All I was thinking about was how people were looking at me. And it’s like… babe no one is looking at you. Yet, you’re letting it ruin your whole night. You have to have that reassurance come from within. You have to place your own self worth. It’s important to make sure you’re being a good friend and daughter. But at the end of the day, your identity and who you are at your core needs to be affirmed by yourself.
A: And it’s your soul, and how you engage with the world and people around you. Not about how you serve cunt.
K: Exactly. That’s just a little fun on the side.
“How you act toward yourself everyday is what becomes your self image and your life.”
What kind of things do you do to stay in touch with your core? I know you do writing nights and other things in your community. What are practices you tap into like, “Okay this is who Abbie is.”
A: I do a brainstorm once a season of things that are energy givers and things that will always bring me back to myself. That’s very much an inner child thing. But in order to assess how you’re doing and how you’re engaging with yourself and others, you have to take the time and space to do that.
Whether that’s a walk or journaling or being in nature. Reading and experiencing art and movies can help you think about your own life. Just making sure I have enough time to be still and mindful and quiet. Meditating is super useful. I usually do that more in the winter. Also cooking!
K: Cooking is a big thing. There’s something magical about creating a little concoction for yourself.
A: And going back to the human basics of breaking bread and making food. Being in nature and being with loved ones and yourself. Making time to slow down is essential for me. Easier said than done. I’m kinda flopping right now because it was a busy season. I need to slow it down in the winter.
K: That’s something I’ve really been working on. I’ve been overwhelmed, and I realized this is a season of my life where I need to say no. But I have horrible FOMO. So I also need to learn how to say no, but then to enjoy the solo time once I do. Like, “Okay, I just set a boundary, which is uncomfortable, now let yourself actually enjoy it.” Because I’ll sit there thinking about how I should have gone.
A: Yep, “saying no.” I’m adding that to the list. Saying no and setting boundaries.
With people, jobs, or social media, do you feel like you’re good at setting boundaries? Are there certain things you have to cut off?
A: I struggle with all sorts of boundaries, and always will because that’s why we are alive. All these issues will be in our whole life but that’s kinda the gag. I like to think I’m getting better day by day. The hardest boundary to enforce is saying no to plans. For the past two years, Sundays are my Abbie nights. Then usually one day during the week too. If I always say yes, I’m filling from an empty cup and not being present or having a good time or being a good friend.
I feel like being busy is how we sometimes escape our problems, for me at least. So I’m trying to sit with it. What am I avoiding? We have to give ourselves the grace and time to figure it all out. It all just ebbs and flows.
K: I guess the important part is taking the time to assess and feel what season of your life you’re in. It’s all about listening to yourself. And it allows you to be a better friend.
Are there any pieces of media or people that have aided in your journey?
Books:
Uses of the Erotic and Poetry is not a Luxury by Audre Lorde
On Self Respect by Joan Didion
The Cost of Living and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree
Brown
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
All About Love by bell hooks
The Diary of Anaïs Nin by Anaïs Nin
People: Jenny Holzer
Gabor Maté
Hanif Abdurraqib
Eve Babitz
Thich Nhat Hanh
Dorothy Lannone
Movies:
Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris documentary
PlatonicIntimacy
I was a late bloomer in love. When everyone around me was in fulfilling romantic relationships, I was still bitter and cynical. I was 22 without ever having a true, real romance. Love was a lost cause. Yet somehow when each Valentine’s Day rolled around, I had a dozen people to confess my love to.
I had Madelyn, my most constant love. And Bridget, my most cosmic love. There was Sophia, my safe and nurturing love. I had Claire, my wisest and most admirable love. There was Morgan, my tender and caring love. And Emily and Emilee and Tali and Francis and Tati and Alexia and Kristen and Rachel and Camille. They were always right there.
I quickly learned that I have never gone a single day without love in my life. My friendships had filled my cup with the most intimate, true love I could ask for. Through my friends, I grew into a more vulnerable, fearless, soft, and wise person. I see bits and pieces of them in everything I do and everywhere I go. How lucky!
Friends unpack baggage that is not their own, over and over again until the load is lighter. Friends listen to stories for the third, fourth, and fifth time with a smile and a nod. With every dinner date, airport ride, lended book, and braided hair, friends fill your life with the romance that you trick yourself into thinking you lack.
Opening myself fully to my platonic relationships has been the most fulfilling and defining experience of my life. My greatest revelations never occurred in a college lecture hall. They occurred with Bridget in the Silky’s parking lot. My most exhilarating memories didn’t come from skydiving. They came from screaming One Direction lyrics with Sophia. My most comforting moments didn’t involve the velvet couch of a psychiatric office. They come from stepping into Madelyn’s always warm and cinnamon-scented home.
Love was always there, swirling all around me.
“Love was always there, swirling all around me.”
best friends forever
by Josephine Lyss Williams
I desired her approval, which was always punctuated by snorting peels of laughter.
Like everyone else, I was drawn to her. We were both new students at our fancy private school. It wasn’t easy to make friends. I was shy. Her confidence and physical acumen belied any sense of inner turmoil. We were twelve, turning thirteen,entering—along with our peers— into an unspoken covenant marked by pre pubescent angst and acute loneliness.
She taught me how to use the internet, how to escape the confines of self and how to create mythologies that lived and died at my fingertips.
Our school, desperate to appear at the cutting edge of STEM pedagogy, thought it best to give thirteen year olds touchscreen laptops. While on campus, a series of firewalls and cyber security measures kept us teens on the straight and narrow. But on the weekends and on those long winter evenings after school, the internet became a play-pretend land for us wayward girls. She showed me that imagination did not fade just because your breast buds started to protrude through your Abercrombie and Fitch henley.
She was an artist, and I was her willing assistant and co-conspirator.
We pretended to be twins on Omegle and updated our Facebook profile pictures with heavily edited photographs taken on my family’s digital camera, captioning them with Lil Wayne and Drake lyrics.
I believed everything she said, no matter how far-fetched.
In line to meet our favorite boy band, she whispered in my ear that we were the prettiest girls at the record store and I believed her.
At Starbucks when she told me Redtube was a new version of Youtube, I believed her.
I held onto her every word as she described some of the more disturbing images she had seen whilst scrolling Tumblr.
The internet, according to her, promised freedom from the suffocation of the self. This promise was intoxicating.
Sometimes her mood would turn capricious. Although I couldn’t always understand her, I would always find a way to acquiesce. I needed her, and she needed me.
But one day she stopped speaking to me. I couldn’t understand why.
Sadness eclipsed all my other thoughts.
It would take years before I could go to bed without fear that I would wake up one day and be as abandoned as I felt the day she stopped speaking to me.
But with time, my newfound isolation from her magnetic pull became a blessing. As much as her silence and apathetic betrayal had been a brutal blow to my ego and self esteem, it only made me more sure in the knowledge that at one point, we had shared something. We had once been united in a common goal, that instinctual desire to survive against all odds. No one can survive alone. That was the essence of friendship. It gave me the solace I needed to move on. I knew there would always be a version of her, a version of me, that only the other knew. I could leave that version behind. And so I did.
Things would never be the same. I told myself it was better this way and I meant it. The resentment in her eyes no longer made me feel afraid. Slowly, the traces of our shared history vanished from her eyes. One day, many years later, I heard she had disappeared without a trace. I couldn’t say I felt surprised.
There was much, I am sure, about her life that she wanted to forget. Things she never told me about. Things I was far too young to understand.
I wonder sometimes where she is now, who she is now. I wonder if her eyes bear any indication of the past. If she resembles at all the person I once knew. I wonder the same thing about myself.
But there is no escaping fate, there will always remain a version of the both of us, doomed to be best friends forever.
It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love
Building Connection + Dreaming New Worlds
by Morgan Kovis
To those who taught me everything I know about love that heals: I am who I am/I know what I know/I live how I live because you love me and I, you (I am strongest when I am with you).
“i want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance. i want a world where when people ask if we are seeing anyone we can list the names of all of our best friends and no one will bat an eyelid. i want monuments and holidays and certificates and ceremonies to commemorate friendship. i want a world that doesn’t require us to be in a sexual/romantic partnership to be seen as mature (let alone complete). i want a movement that fights for all forms of relationships, not just the sexual ones. i want thousands of songs and movies and poems about the intimacy between friends. i want a world where our worth isn’t linked to our desireability, our security to our monogamy, our family to our biology.”
- “friendship is romance,” a poem by Alok V. Menon
“At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape.”
- Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney
In my dreams, I see a forever of building life, creating new ways of seeing, transforming worlds, and shaping a shared future in the arms of my life’s greatest companions, molding and holding each other in a love that is intimate, tender, vulnerable, and intentional. Though the uniqueness of these dreams lies not in my hope for the continuity of a love that is true, its nature is found in something stranger: the grandest love stories I have ever lived are those of my friendships.
My friends, and the moments that make them, constitute my many reasons for a life made beautiful – their faces, the things and places that remind me of them, the songs we sing along to, the ideas that have come into the world only because our two minds were there to give them light. Every moment, as ordinary as they may seem, is filled with divinity, imbued with meaning and hope. I have lived so much of life lucky in love, among supportive, kind, and creative community. Experiencing deeply the pains of girlhood, the awkwardness of self-becoming, the uncertainty of young adulthood, the heartbreak of love and loss, I have always found a hand to hold. And yet, in a world that so often thrives on loneliness, to open one’s heart remains a terrifying task.
Where digitization has reconfigured means for friend-making, where efforts toward relating have become transactional, where disconnection hides covertly behind the guise of a contorted connection, where friendships are increasingly devalued in the grand romantic scheme, life external to the intimate appears to be vampiric in ways I have yet to uncover. Here, socialization, relationship maintenance, and identity creation falls victim to the teeth of the attention economy and state surveillance, prevailing principles of individualism and competition, and the violence of capitalist social life.
Still, even in the most desolate of relational landscapes, the heart grows ever stronger in company. In his talk, aptly titled “Tell a Friend That You’re in Love With Them Tonight: on [Carly Rae Jepsen’s] ‘Your Type,’” poet, cultural critic, and proud Columbus, Ohio native Hanif Abdurraqib urged his willing listeners that friendship is deserving of the same attention and respect as our romantic and familial bonds, stating that “platonic love is vital, essential, and perhaps the only thing left in this wretched landscape that can save us all” (Abdurraqib, 2017). As the end nears, loving community is ground zero for a hope that overturns and disturbs.
“Experiencing deeply the pains of girlhood, the awkwardness of self-becoming, the uncertainty of young adulthood, the heartbreak of love and loss, I have always found a hand to hold.”
Always stronger together, platonic intimacy is worth protecting. Our friendships gift us the space to “experience the joy of community… where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected” and, in turn, “[strengthening] all of our intimate bonds” (hooks 133-136). All instances of sociality, inwardly and outwardly, are inherently educative; however, our platonic bonds, in particular, offer a compassionate mirror to the self for reflective practice. Allowing us to look outside of ourselves, these loving connections act as a workable site for the reinterpretation and rewriting of one’s values and worldly underpinnings.
I find it hard to believe you don’t know
The beauty you are
But if you don’t, let me be your eyes
A hand to your darkness so you won’t be afraid
- The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967
The project of defining intimacy is a contentious and elusive task. So often restricted only to the physical and erotic sphere, intimacy exists rather broadly and subjectively. In their book of the same name, Sophie K. Rosa coined the idea of “radical intimacy,” “[insisting] that to remake the world we must pay attention to connection, care and community as sites of struggle…[bringing] us closer – to ourselves and to each other – in ways that fuel our struggles towards revolutionary horizons” (Rosa 4). Intimacy characterizes a spiritual and life-affirming closeness which is deeply and intricately woven with the personal; yet, capable of manifesting a joy and groundedness that ripples to all of life’s darkest corners.
Rosa, among many other thinkers much more eloquent and articulate than I, poses the challenge of shattering the predetermined, restrictive structures for loving that we have grown into.
She states: “in the macrame of loving design, we might find the purpose and strength we need, to weave new worlds” (Rosa 173). Inspired (most importantly) by everyone who has given shape to my life’s greatest feelings and longings, the love I strive to embody is one built on dreams, on a queer future, on a revolutionary, liberatory politic, on radical intimacy.
How, then, might we aim to cultivate an intimacy that presents opportunities for transformation? In a world that implores us to act otherwise, “can friendship, instead, be an emancipatory source of connection, care and community? How can we build friendships that hold and sustain us as we collaborate for better futures?” (Rosa 166). Through time and effort and intention, we can dare to build a platonic intimacy that is tender, vulnerable, and passionate.
When everybody leaves you lonely
And times are worse than sad
And the world is falling on your head
Just remember for all you know
Good or bad, come what may
You’re gonna live tomorrow if you don’t die today
It takes a muscle to fall in love
It takes a muscle to fall in love
It takes a muscle to fall in love
- Spectral Display, 1982
In the words of Spectral Display: it takes a muscle to fall in love. We learn love by daring to be brave enough to open our hearts to one another, and our world. The words and phrases presented below encapsulate what I believe to be the non-exhaustive conditions for strengthening one’s muscles for connection. My hope is that generalized reciprocity, romance, mutual growth, and play will be of use as sites for inspiration while growing in love, points for reflection, or ideas for cultivating intimacy in one’s platonic bonds, today and everyday after:
Generalized Reciprocity
What positive effects live in the acts of helping and supporting one’s loved ones, simply because love guides you? As an alternative to the culture of transactional help manufactured by the age of service apps and productivity culture, generalized reciprocity embodies a theory of giving in which no specific outcome is expected. I love to cook for my friends because I want us both to eat well. I love driving my friends home because I can sleep well knowing they’re safe. In cultivating this sense of mutuality, we may listen closer to other’s needs, breeding greater feelings of empathy, trust, care, and interdependence among our loving friendships.
Romance
What would it be like to treat your friends with the same care as you would a romantic partner? To take them on a date to a nice restaurant? To admire tree-lined streets while holding hands? To buy them flowers? To be thoughtful with your time and your words? To read to them from your favorite book as you both get ready for a night’s sleep of dreaming? To pour your heart out in a handwritten note?
Mutual Growth
To me, love is holding one another to a mutual standard of “better together” with gentleness and compassion. Through growing, comes struggle, vulnerability, and (inevitably) equal parts of difficult and joyful times. At the root of growing lives learning – about oneself, one another, and the world outside of you. Closeness is born from openness, where hard conversations make space for moments for processing, honesty, and understanding.
Play
Live life through the eyes of a child – prioritize laughter, tell stories, create freely, explore new places, be curious above all else.
“True love is irresponsible, irrepressible, rebellious, scornful of cowardice, dangerous to the lover and everyone around her, for it serves one master alone: the passion that makes the human heart beat faster. It disdains anything else, be it self-preservation, obedience, or shame. Love urges men and women to heroism, and to antiheroism — to indefensible acts that need no defense for the one who loves.”
- Join the Resistance: Fall in Love, 2000
FamilialIntimacy
To know me is to know all of the people that have come before me.
My resounding, sometimes cacophonous, laugh is mirrored in the joy of my mother. Her love language of gift giving has resulted in my hoarding of hundreds of trinkets and goodies throughout my life. My sentimentality in all things is reflective of my father’s deep nostalgia, seen in his cherished receipts from each vacation of decades past, and his refusal to retire his twenty year old flannel pajamas.
My love for fashion was guided and molded by my grandma’s sewing machine, the same one that created my most beloved childhood outfits. Sitting in my art history courses of high school and college, I walked the footsteps of my grandpa, who can recite every fact from every corner of the Uffizi. The key to the perfect brownie batter is a few drops of almond extract, one of the greatest lessons I have learned from my paternal grandma. And when most grandparents tell their grandchildren to “Be good for mom and dad,” my grandpa would send us on our way with a hug and his iconic, “Be bad.”
And there is the love I feel for my sister, one that I can hardly articulate in words, but I will try here. Where a twenty year old stands, I see a tousle-haired, chubby fingered child with a black olive adorning each of her fingertips. While my platonic and romantic relationships are integral to my being, I have never known a truer extension of myself than through her. There is an undying desire to see your sibling glow, grow, and prosper that resides in the heart of an eldest sister. This is a dream that I will hold for her for the rest of my life. When new milestones come our way, moments as big as weddings and childbirth, the joy that we share together will take me back to the feeling of opening matching dolls with her on Christmas day. Knowing that her love can take me back to my purest moments before the rest of the world really knew me.
I have been honored to experience the most loving, tender upbringing, though not without its trials. Where every family has its struggles, unique to the amalgamation of each member’s experiences, there stands the chance to forge deeper understandings, to twist and turn as the roots of a tree, fitting into one another as the years go on. To learn through love and loyalty is the true gift of familial bonds; to revert to your most stripped back self and fall into warm, waiting arms.
Where every family has its struggles, unique to the amalgamation of each member’s experiences, there stands the chance to forge deeper understandings, to twist and turn as the roots of a tree, fitting into one another as the years go on.
soul ties
the indelible touch of sisterhood
A magazine created by two eldest sisters, Respire has been crafted not only by the trials of girlhood, but through a deeper understanding of loving care that is held by the elder of two sisters. Through stolen sweaters and borrowed makeup, you see the baby before you grow into a blossomed reflection of yourself. An extension of your aches and pains, a recipient of your most laborious life lessons, your soldier to send off into the world. The love you give her reflective of the love you could hold for yourself.
Elia and Addi are two sisters who are inextricably linked. To know one is to know the other. Nobody else could embody the deep intimacy shared between two sisters, with their love radiating off the page.
To know one is
to know the other.
RomanticIntimacy
The whispers on the street unanimously declare that dating and romance are dead for our generation. The tide has turned from going steady and landline phone calls to Hinge likes and booty calls. We are living through a seemingly failed social experiment.
The last time I wrote about romance, it was on being a late bloomer in love. I had reached my limit on how many times I could rewatch the dad’s monologue in Call Me By Your Name. The bad dates with insufferable New York City fashion men had depleted my hope in humanity. Edits of Luke and Lorelai sent me over the edge. It was by definition a lost cause.
And then it happened just as the peanut gallery had suggested it would. Love drifted in with a late August breeze and landed right under my nose.
It was in a state of laughter that I realized the person in front of me was someone worth holding on to. It is in a state of laughter that I have remained for the past year of my life. It is through loving him that I know I never even slightly liked any of the others that came before.
Love is light and childlike and uplifting and sacred and it is so worth the waiting and the working. Sometimes it is a babbling brook and sometimes it is a pounding waterfall. Sometimes it is dancing on Bourbon Street and sometimes it is a summer night at Venice Cafe and sometimes it is doing nothing at all.
Love is also deeply frightening. It takes bravery to put your heart in the hands of another and break apart the old habits that die so unbelievably hard. It means looking your less than pretty parts in the eye and reworking them. It means putting the years of therapy into practice, while remaining soft and hopeful through it all.
I was cynical and bitter, and then I wasn’t. I had an overflowing pocket full of love to give, and then I got to pull from it. I had only a little bit of love for myself, and now I get to see myself in love through his eyes.
The tides and tables turn. You go from listening to the sad Taylor Swift songs to the happy ones. And you thank God for all of the bad dates and for not letting you settle. And if you’re lucky, he will actually ask you to “go steady”… and you’ll have to google what it means because this isn’t the Brady Bunch. And you’ll love him even more for it.
“It was in a state of laughter that I realized the person in front of me was someone worth holding on to. It is in a state of laughter that I have remained for the past year of my life. It is through loving him that I know I never even slightly liked any of the others that came before.”
tali + julius
In God’s little studio of human creation, Tali and Julius are concocted from the same ingredients. When navigating the trepidatious early days of my relationship, I would text Tali and ask for her and Julius’ combined wisdom on how to answer a text or handle a situation. I remember vividly the first time I saw them together, thinking that this was a love that we should all strive for. Best friends cut from the same cloth, they are an example of pure and authentic dedication.
We gave them the task of carrying a disposable camera around with them for a week to capture their life together in San Francisco.
objects of intimacy
