looking for my own version of america

It's been a while since I posted a non-international travel photo diary here (although I suppose the United States is technically "international" for me at the moment). Even though I only took a dozen or so photos from each place, I picked some of my favorite film shots from 2018 to 2020 in various places across America. There are the places I have once called home: Washington DC, Seattle, Berkeley; the places my friends called home: New York, Phoenix, San Francisco; and the places I visited for the first time: Cape Cod, Dallas, the North Cascades. 

I find I'm less intentional about taking photos when I went on domestic weekend trips with friends or even out in DC for the two and a half years I lived there. I never felt like I had enough photos to post any single trip as a standalone entry the way I do for my travel posts, and for the past couple of years I couldn't decide if I should write about that time I moved across the country to a city I didn't know a single person in. 

Before I could make up my mind, life in DC went from present tense to past tense amidst the quiet lull of pandemic circumstances last summer: I walked to my office to turn in my laptop and said goodbye to coworkers over Zoom, gave away my furniture to a friend moving to DC a couple weeks after I was leaving, and moved to the UK in September with the same three suitcases I first moved across the country with to start all over again abroad. 

There's something to be said about how quickly a new city becomes a home and you suddenly find that you've stopped looking up in wonder the same way you used to when you first arrived. 

Lockdown restrictions in London are finally starting to lift, and even though this past year hasn't gone to plan (but when does life ever?), I can't wait to (re)discover everything there is to love about my new home. I finally started shooting again a couple weeks ago, and now that the days are longer and the skies are clearer, I'm hoping to have some film photos of my life here to share sometime soon. 

xoxo, vivian