I remember so vividly, COVID was like a big deal. My most exciting thing that was going in my life was that I was about to go see Billie Eilish in concert and, you know, and I was supposed to be March 15th and everything here got shut down on March 13th. I think, that sort of realization, like, “Oh, the world has stopped”, sort of hit the existential. Then it went from me and the same two people, we saw only that group of people for three months. I spent all of March in my house, but we would be on FaceTime 24. So this all, this friend group really started from a FaceTime call that we had for my friend's birthday, and I'm pretty sure it was, March or April. Once that happened, me and four or five people were on FaceTime till like 5 AM every night until we could see each other. So from May, June, July, August, and we started back in school hybrid in September, like that whole summer and extended summer, literally it was just us on some skateboards going through the world. It was me and my friend Jillian, my friend John and my friend Michaela, we all secretly would longboard around my town. Mostly me, Jill and John, we would literally spend the night, playing like Roblox and then, we'd wake up 1 PM and we'd go get a monster and skate around my town until we were too tired to get home and shower and play Roblox again. And the cycle sort of repeated. And that was a lot of my summer, a lot of my summer. As things like left a little bit, we'd go to like each other's pools. And then, we stumbled upon another friend, Aiden, who we bumped into skating actually, we were both skating on the trails, and we had recognized him from our school, and he lived near us. So it was all, it was an interesting time, a very, a smaller group, it was literally just like the four, five, six of us.

I mean, we don't get to see each other as much obviously, which is sad. But I mean, to this day, that friend group, like every time you're all home, you will have one big sleepover in one of our tiny bedrooms. Especially cause half of them are at the same grade of me. And half of them are a year below me. So I think we had a rough patch when three of us left for college, but the rest of them were in high school. Cause it's like, “Oh, they're still seeing each other every day, but we're gone.” So I think that sort of moment brought us all back together. And then, you know, we had that this summer. It was our all of our last summers before going back to college. Some of them before starting college. And then that summer we again, saw each other all the time. And now it's, kind of repeating itself every time we go home. It's like as many times, literally as much as possible, we see each other, even if it's like, “Hey, do you want to go to 7 Eleven at midnight, you'll get a slushie.”

I mean, I'd say like, I just try to be open and accepting of everybody. I could say I am naive, honestly. I mean, I think I'm naive in a sense I'm young and I'm still meeting people and it's all this whole thing is still new for me and my frontal lobe still has six more years to develop. So I would not say that I'm not naive, I definitely am naive in a sense where the world is definitely very new and I'm like a baby bird absorbing taking it all in. But I think that always the first one to trust a stranger. I feel like I've met so many people off of a whim where we had one conversation and that we're friends.

I take things from around me and bring it into my personality. So I definitely think, like, my style is definitely just another outlet for that of me, you know, taking everything that I'm absorbing like a sponge and, you know, mixing it into one major thing and my emotions and even like the TV shows that I'm watching and everything else. I feel it defines me as a person. I feel like I my heart is literally out on my sleeve. I buy new clothes. It's more just of like, expanding what I already have. So it's kind of a cycle of things that I've collected over time and then new things I add to that. It's like sort of like a archive collection, but it's not actual archive. So, I think I also would say styling makes my style more over one item. I think that no one item really defines my style. I think they all kind of come together in this crazy colluded mass that is my brain put into an outfit. I'm not a summer outfit kind of person. I am always wearing a lot of layers. My laundry is always piling up because I'll have five layers in an outfit. I think everything in my life is a collection of everything that I've been done, seen, heard. I think there's certain items in my closet that I could describe them, a tee and I can draw them out right now from memory.

And I think that translates into really generally everything I do. I mean, it's funny. I'm like, I'm talking in the corner of my room, my front door is right there and I could see everything in my room and I, I keep on looking around, and I'm just like more and more I'm realizing that this room is just like, like representation of what we've been saying. It's a collection of everything that I've sort of been interested in. And I'm like, all my favorite artists are on the walls. My designs are on the wall. I have bows on the walls. Like I think it's just, it's funny, having this conversation and looking up and being like, “oh, like, yeah, like it's just everything around me has become what I am right now.” It's like a stupid, I have like a sticker from when I visited my friend's dorm and I had to like check in, I put that on my wall. It's more not like one thing that I collect to remind myself. It's a bunch of little things that sort of come together to be the chaos in my head.

I'm a person that like, really, really, really wants to see everything and go everywhere. My dream life would just be able to be happy, do something I love in fashion, and be able to travel and get around and just. experience, you know, the world for its cultures. Because for me,I have a, you know, like object permanence and, how it's hard to perceive other things that you haven't seen for yourself. I'm, I'm the strongest victim of that. The world beyond what I have seen is really hard to sort of imagine being real. And, like, the concept of there's, like, eight, nine billion people all existing on this planet right now is really hard. And I would love to, go everywhere and to see what that's like.