(je)june

This piece would have been life-sized about seventeen years ago. I am sinfully envious of my childhood self. She was naive and playful, encountering monsters with hesitant friendliness. I call this jealousy nostalgia. I am sinfully envious of my imaginary friends. These friends taught me to search through the sky for something, anything to free me from these dreams. They are stuck in my youth, saving a younger me from the monsters in her nightmares—monsters with no claws or wings or sharp teeth, just blind silhouettes that stood in my path. I am sinfully envious of these monsters. They flow freely with the wind, comforted by darkness, never afraid. But these figments of imagination were small enough to slip through the cracks in my skull as I grew to learn to love the land around me. The media of charcoal helps me build a hauntingly beautiful fog, an interpretation of the way I understood the world as a child. She built her world from darkness, and it is one without walls.