Joan Didion said, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

Nodding terms to me feels like recognition without longing. Acknowledgement without wanting to go back.

I’ve gone through so many stages of loving and hating my tattoos, and I’ve always felt such discomfort with the back and forth. After paying hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars to lie in front of someone for hours and have them color into my skin, you’d think that a decision that expensive, painful, and permanent would require a sort of absolute and lasting clarity, but sometimes it’s not so black and white.

I have a Coco Chanel quote on the back of my arm that I’ve had a complicated relationship with over the years. For a long time, being embarrassed by it was more muscle memory than reaction. When other people ask the dreaded question, “What does your tattoo say?” I already had my response queued up, the mandatory motions I’ve come to know so well:

It’s exhausting.

I wasn’t embarrassed by its placement, but by how poorly it aged, and I don’t mean aesthetically. The ink never changed. I did. This single tattoo has lived three lives on my skin.

Life 1: The Sincere and Youthful Era

“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”

At every stage of my life, I’ve tried so hard to “fit in” and adjust to the mold my surroundings required. Sometimes that meant making myself small, staying quiet if I didn’t feel I had anything to add, and doing my best not to invite criticism. Somehow, despite my best efforts, I still heard that I didn’t quite fit, that I was still too much, or not enough. When I got this tattoo, I told myself that the world needed more eccentricity, and I was irreplaceable because of it. I was deciding that the parts of me that didn’t fit neatly into other people’s expectations were worth embracing.

Life 2: The Cringe Era

“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”

I began to read it differently, with more emphasis on the “in order to” part, like I was a walking instruction manual. It began to feel like I was carrying uncomfortable implications about relationships. If someone replaced you, left you, or betrayed you, perhaps you simply weren’t different enough to be irreplaceable. Love, relationships, and human worth are far more nuanced than my tattoo gave credit for. People hurt people, they make mistakes, and they leave. But being left doesn’t mean you failed to make yourself irreplaceable. You already were.

Life 3: The Coming Back Around Era

“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”

The original spirit of why I got this tattoo in the first place has found its way back to me, but I’ve done some growing in the time since. We are all unique through the sheer nature of existence, and that automatically makes us irreplaceable. The relationships that are wrong for us tend to fail, and sometimes we’re lucky that they do. Being different was never something I needed to perform or apologize for, and my worth was never something I needed to prove.

But I don’t think the question is, “Should I remove it?” What’s fascinating to me is that I likely could have removed it during era two, but then I would never have gotten the chance to experience it in era three, and whatever eras come next.

So no, I think the question is, “What do I owe the people I used to be?”

Do we abandon those we outgrow? Or do we owe our past selves the dignity of not judging the choices they made then based on the wisdom we have now?

A tattoo may be fixed, but its meaning doesn’t have to be.

For a long time, I thought my fascination with travel was about seeing new places. Looking back, I’ve realized it was more about freedom.

I wasn’t afraid of staying in one place. I was afraid of being reduced to a single version of myself.

In my mind, staying in the same place meant putting myself in a box. It meant everyone thought they already knew everything there was to know about me. They knew my mistakes, the things I’d outgrown, the relationship I stayed in well past its expiration date, and eventually my identity began to feel sealed. The feeling of being frozen in other people’s version of me always felt more terrifying than starting over from scratch. So, I treated every new assignment like a possibility. I found comfort in knowing there would always be a departure date, that whatever wasn’t working could eventually be left behind. Wherever I ended up next, I got to decide who I was before anyone else did.

Experiencing life in new places introduces me to parts of myself I couldn’t have met otherwise. Different places ask different things of us. Different seasons of life reveal different strengths, fears, and desires. I don’t know that we can ever truly discover our whole selves all at once or from just one place. I think we spend our lives gathering pieces. A city teaches us something. A relationship teaches us something else. A career, a heartbreak, a friendship, a loss. Each one hands us another piece of the puzzle.

Some part of me thought I was always supposed to associate leaving with loss. But what if we spent as much time wondering what we might lose by staying? What if the place we’re afraid to leave is keeping us from discovering another piece of ourselves?

I don’t know if the learning and growing ever end. I certainly hope they don’t. I think I’d feel stuck and sad in whatever world that is.

The person I’ll be ten years from now is a stranger to me. Maybe I’ll finally want the forever home that I can’t imagine today. Or maybe I’ll still be chasing the feeling of arriving somewhere new. I’ve stopped trying to predict which version of me will be the final one.

I’m much more interested in meeting the next one.

One day when I was scrolling through the internet, probably avoiding doing the thing that needed to be done, I came across a painting that made me pause. The first thing that caught my attention was the artist’s use of light. The sun is clearly there, tucked somewhere between the houses, yet the viewer never actually sees it. I stopped scrolling because I wanted so badly to dive into it further, beyond the surface level. Five years later, I’m writing about it because it’s a piece that stayed with me much longer than I knew it would have.

Once I got past the light, I took note of the main subject, a man. He is standing in his yard and holding a rake. Although he isn’t actively raking, it feels like we’re catching him in the middle of something. As if he’d just extended the rake for another pull before his thoughts wandered elsewhere. Then I started to notice some smaller details, such as his clothing. He is not wearing yard clothes, or at least not the sort of yard clothes you would see me wearing should I have to go outside and do some form of manual labor. No, he looks to be wearing something he may have worn to work that day, like he just arrived back home not too long before. The warmth of the painting and the angle of the light led me to believe it was early evening or late summer. It feels as though the sun is beginning to set. As he pauses from his task, something is either on his mind or he is just allowing himself a moment to space out, something deeply human and very relatable. Either way, he looks off into the distance, and the viewer is left to decide if he is just admiring the sunset or imagining a different life. Looking closer, I get the sense that he is at least middle-aged based on his lack of hair, but the artist leaves that open for interpretation as well. Scanning around, you can see that the lights are off in what is presumably his house and the curtains have been left open. We are left to wonder, does he live alone? When I look at this painting, the story I’ve assigned is that he is a man who has accepted what his life looks like. He doesn’t have anything to hide, and he’s out in the open for us to see. I do, however, find myself wondering if I am witnessing his loneliness, or if I am projecting my own understanding of solitude onto him? I don’t know the answer to that. The painting is remarkably simple in that there aren’t an abundance of context clues for us to draw our observations from. However, even though the painting isn’t busy in a chaotic sense, it somehow still has plenty to say.

People expect paintings to explain themselves, and in a way they do. Just not with the flashy marquee sign we’re all expecting. Instead of looking for one obvious answer, I slowly examine everything. Hands. Are they still or are they in motion? Are they empty or holding onto something? Eyes. They are the windows to the soul after all, and the easiest way for a viewer to understand the emotions of the subject. Background. This one is easy to want to skim past or chalk up as just filler details, but the background will almost always provide additional context. Objects. More often than not, they aren’t just there as decoration but to serve a purpose. Challenge yourself to treat it like a Nancy Drew novel, and gather all the evidence before drawing your own conclusions. Light. What time of day is it? What is the weather? Do the clothes you see people wearing in the scene support this hypothesis, or do you need to sit with the image a little while longer? Every piece of art has tiny details, minutiae, that are just daring you to overlook it. Don’t take the bait. Eventually the story starts to reveal itself, but you have to slow down enough to trust the process.

When I look at this specific painting, I believe it is a Tuesday. Tuesday has always been my outlier. Monday has a purpose, we’ve just come off the weekend and it’s the day meant to set the tone for the week ahead. Wednesday is hump day, and there’s something therapeutic about knowing you’ve made it to the halfway point - it’s all downhill from there, right?! Thursday is Friday Jr. Nothing can go wrong because tomorrow is your last day. And Friday is Friday. This one needs no further explanation. But Tuesday? Tuesday just kind of hangs out. It’s the conversation you’re having with the person who can’t pick up on your context clues and doesn’t know that it was over ten minutes ago. Tuesday is the bottle of Dial soap in the work bathroom that someone keeps adding water to to extend its life instead of just buying a new one. Tuesday just sort of exists, and no one asked for it. To me it’s the day that disappears, the day you can’t describe what you did, what you wore, or who you spoke to if asked about it three weeks from now. Nothing special happens on Tuesday. That’s the point. It’s the perfect example of ordinary life, and it’s exactly why I see Tuesday when I look at this man raking his leafless yard. We should probably all be working four-day workweeks anyway, but I digress.

Alas, I’m not really here to define Tuesday, because aren’t we all just collecting Tuesdays? Have I said Tuesday enough? No? Well then let me at least explain this last piece.

Everybody has something that feels like this painting. Whether that is coming home after work and having to make dinner when you really just want to go through a drive-through and be done with it. Or going to the grocery store to get that one ingredient you keep telling yourself needs to remain a staple in your pantry, but you keep buying everything else instead of that. It’s doing the laundry and most definitely folding it right after the dryer stops, while it’s still warm, and absolutely never leaving it in a pile to sort through every morning as you get dressed for work. Oddly specific, let’s just leave that one alone. This painting may feel like waiting at the red light or stuffing the damn comforter back into the duvet because you were so set on being trendy. It might be waiting in line at the post office or walking the dog. It’s getting it all done just so you can wake up and do it all over again tomorrow. It’s quiet suburbia.

I saw this painting before I ever knew its title. Now I know that it’s called, Pennsylvania Coal Town by Edward Hopper. To me this painting isn’t really about Pennsylvania and it isn’t about any specific coal town either. It’s about ordinary evenings and our routines. It’s that feeling of time slipping by because those routines have started to blur together and our days have become carbon copies of themselves. But a subtle plea to you, if I may? I, more than anyone, love having something to look forward to. I love to dangle the carrot and run really fast in my new sneakers just as much as the next person. But I don’t only want to live for whatever the next exciting thing is. Time isn’t only measured in birthdays and vacations, it’s measured in Tuesdays. If we spend our lives only waiting for the extraordinary moments, we may just look back and realize we’ve lost the entire plot.

Welcome to the very first issue of Spaces Between.

Like many new things, this started as an idea. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on but have been building toward for much longer than I realized.

I bought my first camera in 2012 when I was living in South Korea. It was my very first time living in another country, and I couldn’t leave without at least trying to document it. Since then, I’ve been taking photos and capturing places I wanted to remember.

This publication is where my love of travel, photography, and writing come together in one place.

In Volume One, I’m exploring places within my current corner of the world. Throughout the first quarterly issue, I’ll be wandering through Tucson, Scottsdale, and Prescott, Arizona. The three places I’ve picked have been on my to-do list for a while now, so I’m excited to finally visit them and share my photos and thoughts with you.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

-Angela Gray

Editor & Photographer | Spaces Between

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I wish so badly that I could rewind time. I wish I hadn’t been so consumed with trivial things in those final days. If only I had known they were your last. When I look back, my heart breaks knowing that I would have dropped everything if only I had known what was coming - not because I didn’t know how much you meant to me, but because I took for granted that there would be another tomorrow.

I’ll carry the memory of those last days with me forever, on an endless loop. A painful reminder of how I never got to say goodbye to the person who loved me unconditionally. My best friend. My problem solver. My favorite person. The one I would just call to say I had nothing to talk about. My biggest fan. My teammate. My mom.

I’m so grateful that I made it home when I did, so that I could see you one final time. Even though you couldn’t see me or speak to me, I got to hold your hand and tell you I was home, that I was sorry, and that you were my entire world, and so much more. Stormi was there too, and she loved you so much.

There will always be a before you and an after you.

. . .

My life has shifted so drastically since you left. Every change I make, everything I let go of, is in honor of the version of myself you always believed in. Moving forward, every step I take, every crossroad I choose, every milestone I reach is dedicated entirely to you.

I carry your presence with me always. In every butterfly, every grasshopper, every sudden rainbow, every gentle breeze, or unexpected rain. Every time I see the sun peak out from behind the clouds, I say, “Hi, my mom.” I promise never to stop doing that. Because if I believe it is you checking in on me, how could it be anything else?

Thank you for leaving me that voicemail all those years ago. I found a way to permanently save the file so it can never be lost, and I listen to it whenever I need to hear you call my name or just hear your voice.

Thank you, too, for the card and the box you sent in the mail. You asked me not to open them until you could watch me do it over FaceTime. They still sit there, untouched. Not because I’m waiting for a call I know will never come, but because as long as they stay there unopened, I still have one last thing from you.

I’m not sure I’ll ever open them. How does someone open a gift from their mom, knowing it is the last one they will ever receive?

. . .

I only hope I am making you proud. Some days I feel strong, and other days I can’t function. You used to be just a phone call away. When you missed a single call from me eighteen years ago during Basic Training, you talked about the guilt you felt, promising to always be there when the phone rang. And you always were.

There are still moments when I reach for my phone because I still need you. There are times I actually dial your number and just let the line ring out, because the illusion feels so safe. Like maybe you’re just washing the dishes.

But please know that I am trying. I’m trying to build a life that would make you smile - a life filled with the kind of moments that would make you want to pull out your phone to take all the pictures, in the way you loved to do. Don’t worry; I will take the photos for you now. I will go to all the places you never got to see. You just got your passport in the mail and never had the chance to use it. So, I will go and see the world for you, explore every corner, eat all of the food, collect every memory, and you will be right there with me.

. . .

As for your daughters, we are all navigating this grief in our own ways, but know that Rachel, Honey, and I will stay closer than ever. And your siblings would make you so proud with how often they have checked in on us, being there on the days that are a bit too heavy.

I will never stop thinking of you. I will carry you with me always, everywhere I go. Forever. Thank you for loving me and thank you for being the best mom a girl could ask for.

This is just the first of many letters I promise to write to you in the spaces between.

And this isn’t goodbye, just an “I can’t wait to see you later.”

“Call you in 5…”

<3 Your Angie