14. Picture Perfect.

Trevor and Juliana walked down the street hand in hand, they had just celebrated their 6 month anniversary by dining at the same establishment, ordering the same entrees, and gorging themselves on the same alcoholic beverage to recreate the night they first met. Of course it was all Juliana's idea, if Trevor had it his way, they would have gone to a slam poetry reading and sit in a dark bar while drinking wine and getting intoxicated from the lyrical rhythm of words. But when Juliana scrunched her nose at the thought of a crowded, smoky hole in the wall with the type of people that intimidated her, Trevor dropped it and conceded to her perfect albeit duplicate evening. Since Juliana overindulged herself with drinks and had to hold onto Trevor's arm as they walked home, he knew it was the perfect time to ask to see her journals.

* * * * * *

When they first met, Juliana fawned over Trevor like she was a star struck groupie hanging out with the band after the show, and while Trevor liked the attention, he did find it rather odd. He often wondered if her enthusiasm was sincere until one night after they finished off their second bottle of wine, Juliana confessed that she was in awe that he was a writer and had always dreamed of becoming one until her creative writing teacher in high school made an example of her poor writing style and weak metaphors that put an end to her ambitions. Trevor listened to her story and saw it as a motivator, had someone made a fool of him like that, he would have taken those words of discouragement and the sneers from his classmates and created something so big and powerful that it would explode onto their psyches so they would never laugh at him again. He would make everyone understand the true power of words and how he could manipulate them and use them to hurt and disgrace others just as he had been shamed standing in front of the his class, redden with embarrassment. Yet as he nodded emphatically while holding her hand as Juliana shared her broken dreams with him, Trevor knew that this was exactly why he stayed with her, because she was so different from him, his exact opposite but in this case opposites didn't just attract, they created a chemically charged reaction that shattered into all the little pieces of what would be his next book.

Since that fateful day in high school, Juliana shelved her desire to write and started recording her thoughts and feelings in a more visual way. She first had the idea one day when she was thumbing through a Seventeen magazine and in between an article for What to Wear Now: 10 Must Have Looks for Fall, where items of clothing and accessories were pieced together and displayed by nonexistent bodies and Confessions of an Online Dater: Real Stories, Real people, Real Love, Juliana saw an ad for a new reality show called A Montage Called Life. The ad was a collage of seven people from vastly different backgrounds crowded around a big question mark that boasted: Where it's ALL Coming Together: Are You IN? Juliana fixated on the ad getting lost in the kaleidoscope pull of the composition and her mind began wandering as she invented stories about who these people were and realized that this was her medium for storytelling and so she made her first montage that day that depicted her raging teenage emotion. She found an anti fur campaign ad that had red paint spilling down a framed picture of animals and asked, "Would you like some blood with your fur?" She just cut out the picture and left the slogan because she didn't care about the message, but she felt compelled by the picture, each animal looked pained but acquiesced to accept their fate, a feeling Juliana felt her entire life but would never be able to express in words and so she continued to create montages of her life for the past 10 years, yet she never shared them with anyone before. As she handed the first book to Trevor, her heart burst with love because not only was she finally sharing a piece of her soul with someone else; she was sharing it with the man she would spend the rest of her life with.