……
It took 16 photographers, 15 writers, 13 months, a handful of hangovers, 2 parents, 1 best friend, an ex-boyfriend and a suburban home to make this magazine.
It started with a question; when are we truly free? And the question came from a feeling, because I’d been feeling trapped. I’d been feeling like I was walking the same black tar streets repeatedly, stuck in a never ending pattern marked by streetlights and snapchat notifications.
I started thinking about freedom, like the first time you pick up a skateboard and the first time you kiss a girl, like smoking and painting and surfing and sneaking out, like bleached hair, cheap wine, nose piercings, green backyard pools and bedrooms crammed with life. Cement pavements and house-lined streets, your best friends dads car, family homes and a sky that was never big enough. Chasing rooftops and highways and always looking for something more than what you have. Youth. Love. Curfews. High school. All of it. I only have a couple of years left to be a teenager and it makes me want to scream in the rain and dance on cracked sidewalks and sleep less and laugh more and fuck up a lot and maybe that’s all a bit cliche and dramatic, but I just want to live and feel everything.
I’m seventeen years old and I’ve yet to experience the world for what it really is. There are so many things I haven’t done or figured out, so many places I haven’t seen and feelings I can’t describe and people I haven’t kissed. I feel like in high school, we’re always looking for the best and most likable versions of ourselves, like the perfect “me” might be lurking around the next corner. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I wish I could escape. Cut all my hair off, dye it pink, pierce my ears twice, and climb out my bedroom window into the night, where quite literally thousands of worlds and stories are playing out while I’m sitting here in my bedroom typing all of this out in the dark.
Maybe it’s just the teenage adolescence talking, but if that’s the case, then I never want to turn twenty. That would take the luster away
shot by brook mckeon
Last year, most of my friends and I were exiting our high school phase. The idyllic post-adolescence of adulthood is strife with discomfort and uneasiness, a perpetual confrontation with inadequacies as both artists and people, and ultimately, without proper guidance or assurance whatsoever. As we tried to come to terms with our new, “mature for our age” adult selves, I don’t think we could ignore that we ended up becoming even more like the high schoolers we wanted to be back then.
We hung around each other’s houses until 3AM watching movies and laughing, all the while knowing we had our typical minimum wage jobs to run off to a few hours afterwards. We ran around our plastic suburbs and quaint valley towns, taking goofy pictures until the hours became their dim, melancholic blue, and we drifted around the empty city streets in each other’s cars, watching the clementine lights whir by as we tried to set aside the restlessness we were all secretly feeling………….
I don’t want to look to the future to fix everything,
I just want to know the fullness and depths
of what’s right here, already around me.
The friends I had made that night weren’t with me the next morning because they’d been looking for the same thing I had. It wasn’t a fun night out. Just an escape from the tormented minds my fellow 16 year olds shared. It’s like the first snow in winter. Everything’s beautiful in the beginning, until the cold sets in. Making angels and staying out in the white euphoria only leads to numbness and pain.
But it’s fun for a little.
what freedom. issue 1.
released may 2019.