Jasmine Bradley

Her Best Photo

This obsession had officially taken over. Her grace was gone, her confidence had withered and what was once a brilliantly white notebook was drenched into a hue of black. When Marlene Burkett first began this search, she never imagined that she would go this far or become this consumed within it. That night of her gallery opening became the most defining event in her 25 years of life. A life that was froth with perfection and beauty. A life that exuded the scent of privilege and utter acceptance in everything she did. Every photo she ever took, the classically beautiful and the unmistakably stunning, she couldn’t look at the same. The stylized descriptions she wrote in her notebook about these photos with her once exquisite penmanship now seemed vapid and unimportant. The descriptions, as Marlene took more risky and more vulnerable photos, were written with the hand of a lost, frustrated, and disillusioned person. It was a small and almost indistinguishable font with short blunt lines and mysterious black smudges all over the paper.