In the heart of Harvard, Alessia Gilmore is ready to embrace her second year and the independence it brings. After a summer spent reconnecting with friends and discovering herself, she's determined to step out of her twin sister Rory's shadow and ca...
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Alessia sat on her dorm room floor, surrounded by a maze of photo prints and undeveloped rolls of film. As she held one of the shots up to the light, she noticed the faint tremor in her hand. She could no longer avoid facing the project head-on—it was time to let her lens capture more than she'd ever shown anyone.
The theme of "identity" echoed in her mind, but in a way that went deeper than her professor could have imagined. Alessia's story was complex and bruised, a history written in invisible ink, made up of neglected moments, buried memories, and a constant sense of being second. Her project, she decided, wouldn't just be an assignment. It would be a chance to tell her story, raw and unfiltered.
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Her first stop was the campus courtyard, which was blanketed in the quiet of early morning. She chose a solitary bench, the same one she often passed by without noticing. She set her camera at a low angle, capturing the bench as a dark, lonely figure in a world alive with the vibrant green of the trees and grass around it. The framing felt isolating, as though the bench didn't belong in the scene but was somehow bound to it. She clicked the shutter, locking in the emptiness, the silent displacement.
It reminded her of home, where she'd watched the closeness between her sister and mother, her own place always on the periphery. She had never been the one in focus, never been part of the warm, intimate frame they shared. She was just there—a shadow, a fixture. Unnoticed. Unneeded. The photo captured that feeling, the loneliness and stillness, in a way she hadn't expected. She felt herself fracture a little as she lowered the camera.
Next, she headed to a small alley behind the student center, where she'd noticed broken windows that hadn't yet been repaired. She positioned herself in front of a pane with a large, jagged crack slicing through it, one that fractured her reflection into unrecognizable pieces. She raised her camera and clicked, catching herself through the fragmented glass, her face split and distorted, edges sharp and threatening. In the shot, her features were warped, fractured into parts that could barely be recognized as human.
As she stared into the fractured reflection, she saw more than a broken image—she saw the girl she'd grown up as, the one who had to make herself into pieces to fit others' expectations, who'd been splintered by years of comparison and whispers. She saw the Alessia others thought they knew, a version so shattered it was hard to imagine her ever being whole. She blinked back the sting of tears, but her hands stayed steady. She clicked again, capturing her face as a collection of cuts and cracks—a girl always on the edge of breaking.
The day wore on, and with each shot, Alessia felt herself peeling back layers she'd hidden even from herself. She went to the old library basement, where the lighting was dim and heavy, shadows casting thick darkness between the towering shelves. She positioned her camera to capture a dark, empty row of shelves stretching into a void of blackness, leaving just enough light to trace the end of the path. She clicked the shutter, freezing the image of a lonely road shaped by narrow walls, suffocating and still.
The picture reminded her of how she had grown up bound to a life shaped by someone else's expectations, by paths other people made. She hadn't had a say; she'd just been expected to follow, to meet every milestone of a path that wasn't hers. The photo captured it perfectly—the emptiness, the feeling of being locked into a future already decided, the dark path shaped not by possibility but by someone else's hand.
Later, she headed back to her dorm, the weight of the project pressing on her chest. For the next shot, she turned the lights off and draped a thin cloth over her desk lamp, casting her room in a faint, ghostly glow. She set up her camera to capture herself sitting against the wall, half in shadow, her gaze downturned and distant. The photo, she imagined, would reveal a girl both revealed and hidden—a person always caught between stepping into her own light and fading into someone else's shadow.
As she took the photo, a deep vulnerability surged through her, realizing that this image was exposing a part of herself she had spent years trying to hide. She thought of the countless times she had tried to be seen, to stand out, only to be shunted back into a shadow she couldn't seem to shake. It was the version of herself she hated—the one who'd accepted it, who let herself disappear to keep the peace. She held her breath and clicked, capturing the girl trapped in a shadow she hadn't made.
The final image she decided to capture was in a forgotten corner of the art building, where she'd noticed a cracked, water-stained wall one day. She placed her camera low to the ground, angling it upward to emphasize the looming ceiling and the imposing, cavernous height, leaving her to look small and dwarfed against the decay. She took the shot, capturing the cracked, neglected space as a symbol of the life she'd felt abandoned in—those years of feeling left behind, unacknowledged, as if her life was an afterthought in someone else's story.
She imagined herself as that cracked wall, a forgotten piece in a grand design, unvalued and invisible in the larger picture. She clicked the shutter, the image capturing both the vast, empty space and the stains left by years of neglect. The shot felt devastating. She stared at it, feeling her heartbeat in her throat, knowing that no one who saw it would truly understand what it meant. But for the first time, she felt she'd shown it anyway.
That night, Alessia developed the photos, each print surfacing like a confession, parts of herself she'd kept hidden laid bare on the table. Each image told her story: the isolation of always watching from the edges, the brokenness she tried to keep hidden, the darkness of a path she hadn't chosen, the painful confinement of a shadow she could never shake, and the feeling of being as forgotten as a stain on an old wall.
As she examined the photos one by one, Alessia felt a strange, raw relief—a release of tension she hadn't even realized she'd been holding. She knew her professor might not understand, that her classmates might see only shadows and shapes. But for her, it was everything she'd kept inside. For the first time, she felt a quiet pride—not because she'd created something perfect, but because she'd let herself be honest.
