I need to articulate something, but I can’t.

The fact is that I can’t even look at the book, let alone look through its pages without feeling a tear or a hundred wanting to break through.

I bought it without knowing what it was about. I sort of just wanted a signed book by John Green, and I knew it would be, at the very least, really quite good. When I finally got my hands on it, and opened the first few pages to see the dedication, I knew I was in some serious trouble. When I read the brief synopsis in the jacket, I was seriously contemplating just putting it back on my shelf and not bothering.

I’m a crier. I’m a most particular crier when it comes to stories about degenerative diseases vs. families/friends. Again, why I didn’t just put it back on my shelf, I really don’t know.

I consumed the book in one extended sitting. The last 100 pages were spent in an alternating state of tears slowly running down my face or uncontrollable, hysterical sobs. Seriously, books make me cry a lot, but this was just ridiculous.

Not only is the story well-written and involving and true in an absolutely immense and rare way, I seem to lately have contracted a new way of taking in information that left me completely open and vulnerable to this story.

One of my favourite quotes ever is from the TV show Castle where Nathan Fillion’s character asks his love-interest (seriously, if they don’t get it on this season, I’m sending a horse head to the script writers) how you know when you’re in love. She answers simply “all the songs make sense”.

Not only are all the songs ten times more poignant now, all films, all books, all stories in general, tend to hit me in a much more direct way now, as if the path to my heart is now lit with flashing neon signs.

Somewhere along the way the main characters stopped being Hazel and Augustus and became me and my love. I couldn’t take it. It was too real.

When there were only thirty or so pages left, he came down to check on me, and all I could do was cling to him like a koala with vertigo, and it took all my will-power not to beg him with all I had to never ever die.

John Green, I love and adore you and what you do, but I can never ever re-read this book.

But thank you.

The reason why I started this project in the first place was to get out of a bit of a creative slump I was going through, and actually pick up my camera again. Did it work? Partly, For a while I was actually doing quite well, but then I started to lose interest in quite a lot of ways, but being the stubborn idiot I am, I was too proud to give up, so so many of the pictures are, frankly, horrible and/or taken with my phone.

I see people all the time going through these projects and coming out on the other end completely transformed photographers. I wish that was me, but it really isn’t. I’ve come to realise that my creativity can’t be forced, and it will come in waves, and the best thing I can do is probably not to rush it when it’s not there, and simply trust that it will come back.

That said, I am still sort of glad I did it, even though I don’t think I will point anyone towards it as proof of what I can do. It is still a document of everything I went through this year, and I can still look at any of the pictures and remember exactly where my mind was at that time.

That’s the reason behind this picture. This year has been extremely difficult in so many ways, but it has all been worth it, and I have come out on the other end, today, happier than I have ever been. I never thought I would be the person that actually got to be unreservedly happy, but I was, and I am.

Here’s to 2012. It can be nothing but amazing.

And her last words were “I was only thinking of you”