Jess Hunter Photography

A lot of people in my life (mainly Protestants and nonpracticing Catholics) confuse the love I have for the dead with just an edgy, strange fascination with the macabre and I wanna scream at them. I go to cemeteries and I visit the graves of the people who've passed a very long time ago. They're left there at the back of the property, resting places unkept and forgotten, headstones covered in moss, broken, barely legible. But they're safe, they have markers that indicate they existed. How many more don't? How many people do we not know about? In all of human history... I can't even fathom the numbers. Did they have anyone to pray for them by name after they died? I know I don't need their names to pray for them, but wouldn't it be nice, after centuries in purgatory, to have someone praying for you specifically? Whispering, knowing your name? Wanting not just salvation for all the holy souls, but yours specifically?

Why does that make me strange? Why can't me and my feelings just be left alone? Or instead, why can't they knock it off with the judgemental "oh she's just spooky" comments and help me pray for them

Death isn't weird. It's not scary or spooky. It's a human fact and something we will all face someday. Can't people just stop treating the dead as scary, disgusting things who shouldn't be talked about and start, I don't know, taking care of them and their resting places????

"There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up."

-Oscar Wilde; The Picture of Dorian Gray

Fireplace at Villa Della Torre Allegrini, Fumane, Italy

Every new day is a chance to try again...

Remember that.

Will o’ the Wisp by Maciej Laszkiewicz

Sleepy Hollow (dir. Tim Burton, 1999)

"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free."

-Arthur Schopenhauer