ORIGIN STORIES
The name of my company, my beloved business venture and life’s work, Paper Plane Photographs, was never a marketing decision; it was a memory, an homage - a reverie of reverence to a life well lived. In college, during one of the hardest seasons of my life, I met the most unsuspecting and outlandish human who would become my lifeline and my fastest friend. His name was Derrek.
FOLDED : I DIDN'T LAND ON THE NAME PAPER PLANE PHOTOGRAPHS BY ACCIDENT. <<
FOLDED
From the moment we met during orientation, there was this strange and immediate feeling of recognition between us, like we had somehow known each other long before that room, long before college, long before introductions and small talk and figuring out who someone is supposed to be. We just got one another. Effortlessly. Completely. In that rare, once-in-a-lifetime way where someone feels deeply familiar almost immediately, like their soul brushes up against yours and quietly says, “Oh. There you are.” We both knew, very early on, that we were supposed to be a part of each other’s lives in some meaningful way. Honestly, he’s the reason I believe soulmates exist & he changed the way I see life, and love, understanding, and fate.
He was funny in that quiet, chaotic, clever way. You know the type : brilliant without needing credit and humble. Derrek was creative in ways that made the ordinary feel electric and the extraordinary feel like it lasted forever and not just the blink of an eye. He had this ability to make people feel seen without ever making a spectacle of it. He moved through the world gently but intentionally, collecting tiny beautiful things most people overlooked and handing them back to others in ways that made life feel a little softer to survive. He was one of the greatest and most true friends I’ve ever had & I miss him every day.
ORIGINS
We were both enrolled in morning classes with a break in between so, every day we’d meet in the courtyard, cut across campus, and head to the cafeteria for coffee like it was sacred ritual. This would turn into sitting together while Derrek smoked a cigarette, talking for hours about art, music, photography, books, people, life goals, and all the strange little things that make a person who they are. We talked about the lives we thought we wanted and the versions of ourselves we were still trying to outgrow. We talked about our pasts, our traumas, heartbreak, fear, and the kind of physical pain that settles into the body and quietly changes the way you move through the world. We talked about the strange weight people quietly carry while still trying to make it through the day looking “fine.” We poured our hearts out while pouring creamer into cheap cafeteria coffee, trying to make sense of ourselves somewhere between lectures, exhaustion, ambition, healing, and becoming.
During class, we’d craft handwritten notes about things we thought were interesting or funny, observations about the world, song lyrics, little philosophical spirals, or things we desperately wanted to remember to tell the other person later but were afraid we’d forget before class ended. Sometimes the notes were sarcastic and witty. Sometimes they were deeply personal. Sometimes they were reminders to breathe, drink water, keep going, or pay attention to the sky on the walk back to the parking garage. We’d always end them with something encouraging or something beautiful we had learned that day that felt worth holding onto a little longer.
Somewhere between lectures and late assignments, we started wondering what would happen if we shared those same fragments of softness with strangers. So we began writing little encouraging notes for people we would never meet. Just a sentence or two. Something kind. Something steady. Something that might interrupt someone’s bad day long enough for them to breathe again. We would fold those notes into paper airplanes and launch them off the escalator into the student center below. No names. No credit. Just anonymous hope in flight.
It became our thing : this quiet rebellion against heaviness. A reminder that perspective can shift in a single moment. That you can send strength without ever being seen. That even the smallest interaction can leave a lasting imprint on another human being. You can help someone preserve that moment - the stillness, the turning point, the quiet unraveling of thoughts & hold onto the clarity that comes when everything shifts into focus.
TRAJECTORY
Derrek saw something in me before I ever saw it in myself; I was no longer invisible. He was my first model and my career + art's biggest supporter. He insisted I was meant to do this thing - that I was meant to tell people's stories, to help people see themselves in another light, to carefully hold life's most precious moments captured in my hands. He was a calm kind of strength, my own personal reminder that this life can be unintentionally cruel and viscerally brutal yet one can stand firm in who they are and love the things about them that others would find callous, ugly, or wrong. He was the darkness to my light & my voice when I didn’t have my own. He was the reason for my first tattoo, the reason certain symbols and memories live permanently etched into my skin the same way his friendship etched itself permanently into my life. He became part of the foundation of who I would become without either of us fully realizing it at the time. Because of Derrek, I gained pieces of a life I cannot imagine existing without now. He was the tie to my godson. He was the link to friendships that became family, including someone I now love and see as the brother I never had. His existence created ripple effects that stretched far beyond the years we physically knew one another. That’s the strange thing about truly loving someone : even after they are gone, they continue shaping the architecture of your life in quiet, permanent ways.
After two tours, he was stop-lossed and became a casualty of war. But his memory did not end there. In many ways, it grew louder. Grief changed me completely. Before losing him, I think I saw grief only as absence, as devastation, as something harsh and hollow, something inevitable. But loving + losing him taught me that grief is also evidence. Grief is the direct irrefutable and undeniable evidence that something existed strongly enough to leave a fracture when it was gone, a chasm. I now understand that there is a strange and sacred beauty inside the saltiest of tears we shed for the people we have loved deeply and lost. Grief is tangible proof that something extraordinary happened here. That someone mattered. That someone altered your life enough that their absence echoes.
Every session I photograph, every story I help someone reclaim, every soft landing I create - it carries the spirit of those folded notes. The belief that a small act of intention can change someone’s entire trajectory. That you never know who needs the reminder that they matter. That even fleeting moments deserve to be preserved because one day they become the evidence that we were here, that we loved, that we changed one another, and that none of it was ever meaningless.
ALWAYS
Paper planes are fragile things. Just paper. Just folds. Just air. But sometimes that’s all it takes to change the direction of a life.
I used to end my letters with the word “ALWAYS.” It became instinctual after a while, this quiet promise that love, friendship, memory, and care did not simply disappear because distance, time, or hardship entered the room. In return, Derrek signed off on his letters - and even journal entries his father would later discover years after his passing - with the ♾️ symbol. Infinity. Endlessness. Something without beginning or end. A reminder that some connections refuse to be contained by time, physical presence, or even grief itself.
I think that’s what Paper Plane Photographs has always been at its core : proof that fleeting things still matter. That fragile things can still carry enormous weight. That moments disappear physically, but never fully leave us once they’ve been loved deeply enough. Photographs become evidence that we were here, that we felt something real, that we reached for one another while we had the chance.
Because of that, every tangible photo package my clients receive includes their very own folded paper airplane tucked carefully inside. Printed on it are the words : “You are enough. You always were.” It’s a continuation of the very last letter I ever received from Derrek and a reminder of the thing both of us spent so much time trying to give away to other people : reassurance, softness, proof of worth. A reminder that your existence was never something that needed to be earned through perfection, productivity, beauty, or performance. You are enough & you always were. That should have never been something you had to question in the first place.
His memory is still in flight. For now. For ALWAYS. ♾️
YOU ARE ENOUGH. YOU ALWAYS WERE. >>