body paintings by Karen Turner

i have so much hair;;

tagged by @songjjong omg i only just saw it now sorry!!

tagging @ominousmasturbating, @lay-mo and @adventuroustitans show me your selfies i don’t see enough of your faces….. at all..

This was my best friend. She passed away two years ago soon and I just got struck with overwhelming emotions that I guess do tend to happen around the time of anniversaries. Something about scrolling through her old account makes me feel like I swallowed something metal and heavy. I’m grounded here.

How many of the people who followed her on here know she is dead? How many still follow her? How many people are still rereading her old fanfictions? They were everything to her.

They read out her fanfiction titles at her funeral. I just know she would’ve cringed at that. I feel her cringing at me now, reblogging this old selfie from 2016, taken far before we even met.

Grief in the age of the internet is very strange. I never met this person in real life. And yet for three years we talked ceaselessly, to this day I’ve never met anyone I can have conversations with like that. Our minds flowed together like water, our conversations lasted days. We were convinced we would be best friends for life, that one day I would move where she lived and we would be roommates. Meeting each other irl seemed absolutely inevitable.

And then, oceans away from each other, we broke each others hearts.

Now she exists somewhere I can’t reach and yet I can still be here, scrolling through her tumblr account, reading posts that have essentially fossilized her voice. So eerily her, but not her. Not ever her again.

I can still scroll through every single message we sent each other, on discord, snapchat, twt, facebook. I can relive our entire relationship if I wanted to.

I don’t think grief was meant to be like this and yet I feel like it’s not enough, like everyday I must scrounge for more and more and more of her because some part of me can’t quite accept that she’s gone.

I don’t know how to move forward and yet I have. I don’t know how to go on, and yet nothing is the same as she left it.

The one thing I do know is that I don’t want anyone to forget.

This is Sayaka Steed. An exceptionally talented writer who’s words could breathe life into nothing. She had a brilliant mind which she used to be the wittiest person I ever met. And you really wouldn’t expect it at first, she was a book nerd and knew it. She thought of herself as shy, and yet she was so fucking hilarious we would regularly laugh to tears together.

She loved. Deeply and with her whole heart. Even people who didn’t deserve it. And especially those who did, like her cat Drake who she had since childhood. (She would want you to know that her cat is named after baby dragons and not!!! the rapper!!)

She loved cats more than anyone else I ever met. I was a dog person before I met her. And now I have Bonnie, a cat she helped me name.

Unfortunately I was not gifted with Kaya’s talent for words but she was a whole, bright, beautiful person. And I’m so grateful that she once called me her best friend.

Sayaka Steed. Sayaka Steed. It’s the age of the internet, hold her name here forever please. Sayaka Steed.

who else is being captivated by the timeless beauty and divinity of music

“Turn thee, Benvolio… and look upon thy death.”

Romeo + Juliet, 1996