ENTRY No.1

Monday 15th September 2025

The Velvet Morning

I woke before the city today, 5 a.m. sharp, when the streets still hide under their blanket of darkness and the last perfume of summer lingers in the air, refusing to let autumn win completely. The mornings are colder, the dawns arrive later, yet somehow, I feel lighter.

My first order of business? Coffee. Not the quick, soulless kind from a machine, but proper Vietnamese coffee my friend smuggled back from her trip. Brewed slowly on the gas stove, filling the kitchen with a bitter velvet smell that almost convinced me life was elegant at 5:12 a.m. I lit a cigarette on the balcony and watched the city blush awake.

By six, the radio was on and the eyeliner black. I don’t always bother; some days, mascara and lipstick are enough to face the world. But today felt different.

Change has been flirting with me lately. The kind of change you don’t invite but end up dancing with at 2 a.m. anyway. I’ve only been in this city a blink, but I’ve lived it like a fever dream, nights that turned to day dancing across Soho, long walks from East to West chasing curiosity like it might save me, and more dance floors than I care to admit. Somehow, every detour lands me back here: the stubborn dream I refuse to let go of.

The truth about life in the city? Change doesn’t knock politely. It kicks the door in, makes itself a drink, and dares you to keep up. For us artists, it’s always the same story: slowly, chaotically, and then, all at once. We break ourselves open and call it growth.

Now, as I stare down the barrel of 25, I feel something shift. For years, I feared losing the child inside me, the wild one, the dreamer, the girl who scribbled poetry into margins and believed every night out might turn into a story. But I see now she’s not going anywhere. She’s stitched into me. Permanent. She gets smarter, wears better eyeliner, and knows when to walk home instead of chasing sunrise. Nostalgia still visits, of course — it always does — but instead of haunting me, I let it sit beside me, whispering softly as I write, as I shoot film, as I archive the fleeting.

This summer, I hauled twelve years of diaries to the South of France. Twelve years of my life, pressed between pages like dried flowers, some still fragrant. 4,383 days of confessions, heartbreaks, delusions, and half-truths I thought no one would ever read. Sitting in a café, I found myself confused by the girl who once tried to convince her own diary she was cool. Imagine lying to your own notebook.

These days, I write differently. I write messy, ugly, honest. Because when I pick up these pages years from now, I want to meet myself, not some curated, sugar-coated version I thought sounded poetic at 19.

So here I stand on the cusp of 25. Photographer. Writer. Storyteller. Still a smoker (though I romanticise quitting like it’s an affair I’ll eventually have to end). Mostly, a woman who finally recognises herself in the mirror.

And maybe that’s the whole point. To stop waiting for the perfect version of ourselves to arrive, and instead, to write from the one that’s already here.

All my love,
Gia