Esme Where the Tide Knows Her Name

Esme Where the Tide Knows Her Name

Lately I've been living in that strange in-between place — the one that exists just after you finish writing something and before you decide whether it was any good. My creative writing thesis has me pulling at threads I didn't know were loose, and I keep finding myself reaching for Ada's hand or for a dice roll, whichever is closer. They do the same thing, honestly. They both remind me that I don't have to hold the whole story by myself.

These photos came from one of those rare afternoons when I felt genuinely present inside my own skin — not performing softness, not narrating myself from a slight distance the way I sometimes do. I think that's what I'm always chasing in my writing and in my D&D sessions: that feeling of being so absorbed in a world that you stop editing your own face. Ada says I get a particular look when I'm actually there versus when I'm just nearby. I believe her. She reads me like tide charts.

What I want people to feel when they look at these is something close to what I feel when I'm mid-session as my fairy sorceress — powerful and delicate at the exact same time, like something that could either bless you or vanish before you finished the sentence. I don't know if I managed it. That's the terrifying and beautiful thing about letting someone photograph you: the image gets to have its own opinion.