“God went crazy when he painted you
Ain’t seen nothing like this before
Took a little extra time on you
Before he let you walk out the door”
Teddy Swims – God Went Crazy
There is something kind of wild about realizing this is the fourth birthday of Mackenzie’s that I have gotten to celebrate with her. I actually had to sit with that number for a second because it doesn’t feel like it should already be four, even as I have enough photos, posts, and memories sitting around this blog to prove that it absolutely is.
One of the really cool things about having this place for as long as I have is that I don’t have to rely entirely on my memory for things like this. I can go back through the years, turn a few pages, and find different versions of us sitting there waiting. Birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, holidays, and completely ordinary days that didn’t feel particularly historic while we were living them but somehow became part of the story anyway. Which, if you know me, you also know I absolutely go back and read them, probably more often than I should.
The first birthday was Bali in 2023. We were still so new then that I don’t think either of us fully understood what we were building. We had only been talking for a couple of months, although “talking” doesn’t really capture those first few months, when conversations regularly stretched until five in the morning because neither of us seemed particularly interested in saying goodnight. One hello had very quickly become this person I wanted to tell everything to, spend all of my free time with, and apparently take halfway around the virtual world for her birthday.
When I booked that trip and realized we would be arriving on her birthday, there was no chance I was letting us walk into that villa as if it were just another day. So there were balloons, confetti, cake, and decorations waiting for her when we got there because I wanted the day to feel different from all the others around it. I wanted her to know that I had thought about it before we ever arrived. Apparently balloons and confetti became a theme because three years later we are right back here surrounded by them again, and honestly, I don’t mind that at all.
I look at that first birthday now, and there is something wonderfully innocent about it. Not innocent in the sense that we didn’t know what we were doing, because we definitely had some idea of what was happening between us by then, but we had no way of knowing the size of everything that was going to follow. We couldn’t have known how many trips we would take, how many photos we would create, how many nights we would lose to conversation, or how many genuinely difficult moments we would eventually have to figure out together. We were just happy, and I really love looking back at us before we knew the rest of the story.
The second birthday never really made its way onto this blog, and I actually like that it gets to remain a little quieter. For as much of my life as I have spilled onto these pages over the years, there have always been pieces that belong only to the people who lived them. Not every memory needs a photograph attached to it or an entire post explaining why it mattered. There is something nice about having pieces of our story that don’t need to exist anywhere except between us.
Then there was last year, except that celebration ended up stretching considerably beyond the actual birthday because life had something much bigger waiting for us a couple of months later. After years of our relationship existing through Second Life, Discord, phone calls, photographs, messages, synchronized movies, and all the other ways we had gotten very good at making distance feel smaller than it actually was, I finally got on a plane, and suddenly there wasn’t a screen anymore.
I don’t think I will ever completely forget how strange it was that being together didn’t actually feel strange. There were plenty of things I expected to feel awkward simply because we had spent years knowing each other through a very specific kind of distance. Instead, so much of it felt familiar almost immediately. The first hug, the first kiss, sitting beside each other in a car instead of talking while one of us drove somewhere hundreds of miles away from the other, holding her hand without having to imagine what that would feel like, and looking over to see her sitting there instead of seeing her face inside a window on a screen.
Then there were all the little things that weren’t supposed to be important and somehow became some of my favorite memories. The long drives, dinners taking forever because apparently neither of us knows how to stop talking even when we’re sitting at the same table, random meals and snack stops, getting lost because directions occasionally become more of a loose suggestion when we’re involved, and me discovering that she was every bit as capable of being my passenger princess in real life as she had promised. Even sitting around doing absolutely nothing became something, because we had spent so much time wishing we could do it together.
I think that’s what stayed with me most from finally being together. The big moments were incredible, but after spending years trying to close the distance between two people through technology, there was something almost surreal about discovering how meaningful ordinary could be. We didn’t need some perfectly planned adventure every second. Sometimes the entire point was that she was simply there. When I look back across these four birthdays now, none of them really look the same, and neither do we.
There has been a ridiculous amount of life packed into the space between that first Bali birthday and this one. There have been vacations, anniversaries, vows, holidays, and thousands upon thousands of messages and photos I adore. There have been late nights, early mornings, ridiculous jokes that stopped being funny to everyone but us months ago, serious conversations, disagreements, apologies, and occasional realizations that knowing someone incredibly well does not automatically mean you’ll always understand them correctly.
We’ve had some incredible highs together and some really difficult lows, and I don’t want to write this as though those parts somehow don’t count because this is supposed to be a happy birthday post. They do. They’re part of why birthday number four feels different from birthday number one. Three years together does not happen in a perfectly straight line, and ours certainly hasn’t.
Earlier this summer, we weren’t even sure what the next version of us was supposed to look like. We had taken some time apart, and I had reached a point where I was trying to understand how someone could remain incredibly important even if the relationship around that importance changed. I meant what I wrote then, and I still do. Nothing that happened between us suddenly became fake because life got complicated, but what I didn’t yet know was that our story wasn’t finished changing.
We started talking differently. We talked about what had gone wrong instead of only talking about the fact that things had gone wrong. We talked about what each of us needed, where we had stopped hearing one another, and what would actually have to be different if we were going to try again. Some of those conversations were easy, and some definitely weren’t. There were things both of us had to own, things we had to understand differently, and places where loving each other wasn’t going to be enough unless we were also willing to do something with that love. Eventually, after all of that talking, we landed on something surprisingly simple: we are better together than we are apart.
I don’t need to turn a birthday post into an entire explanation of how we got from there to here. We know the parts that matter, the people closest to us know enough of them, and there are pieces of our relationship that don’t need to belong to anybody else. What matters to me here is that Mackenzie is my girlfriend, and after everything it took to get back to being able to say that, I really love saying it.
There is something different about loving someone once you’ve had the opportunity to see the relationship without its rose-colored glasses on. That first version of us was exciting because everything was new. We were learning about each other, discovering all the strange little similarities and differences, and figuring out how quickly one person could become part of another’s everyday routine. Eventually, the newness wore off, but something better began to take its place.
It became comfort and familiarity. I know what her face looks like when she’s trying desperately not to laugh at something stupid I said, which silence means she’s perfectly content and which one means I should probably ask what’s wrong. We’ve learned which conversations need to happen immediately and which will go considerably better if we both have an hour to stop being annoyed first. Somewhere inside all of that, what we had started to feel like home in all the ways home actually works, not just the pretty ones.
Home is comfortable, but it also gets messy. Things break. People get frustrated. Sometimes you have to fix something you thought would keep working forever simply because it always had. You don’t throw the whole house away because a room needs work, so apparently we decided to renovate. Honestly, that feels a lot more accurate to us anyway.
I think that’s one of the things these four birthdays show me better than I could explain it any other way. Love doesn’t stay exactly where you first found it. It grows up with you. Sometimes it stretches, sometimes it gets tested, and sometimes you realize that what worked two years ago no longer works. The two people who went to Bali in 2023 were figuring out what they could become. The two people in this photo know considerably more about each other and about what being together actually asks of them. There is less mystery now, but there is also a whole lot more depth.
I know Mackenzie in ways I couldn’t have known her on that first birthday. I know how deeply she cares about people, even when she doesn’t always know exactly how she wants to show it. I know the things that make her nervous, some of the things she doesn’t say out loud, and the little changes in her voice that tell me more than whatever words she’s actually using.
Of course, that familiarity goes both ways, which is frankly unfortunate for me. She knows when I’m overthinking something long before I admit that I’m overthinking it. She knows when I’m trying to pretend something doesn’t bother me and exactly how long to let me get away with that before calling me on it. She knows what makes me laugh, what makes me quiet, and which buttons to push when she wants to annoy the absolute hell out of me. She pushes those last ones far too often, but I love her despite this obvious character flaw.
What I love more is that knowing each other this well hasn’t made either of us static. There are still conversations that surprise me, things I learn about her and ways we both continue to change. I don’t want either of us to become so attached to an old version of the other that we stop paying attention to the person standing in front of us. Three years give us a lot of history, but they don’t mean either of us is finished becoming whoever we’re going to be.
That’s really what a birthday is anyway. We make a big thing out of the number, decorate everything, add cake and balloons and confetti and occasionally make somebody wear a ridiculous hat, but underneath all of that it’s another little marker in someone’s life. Another year of becoming whoever they’re going to be next. This year her birthday happened a few days before I finally managed to finish writing all of this, which is apparently also becoming part of our birthday tradition.
Her birthday happens, I take the photo, I stare at the photo, I start writing something, decide it isn’t saying what I actually mean, rewrite half of it, stare at it again, and eventually end up here several days later pretending this was all part of some thoughtful creative process. We’ll go with that. I don’t really mind that the post didn’t land on the exact day, though, because a birthday is one day and celebrating the person is bigger than that. There is a lot about her worth celebrating.
When I think about what fills the space between these birthdays, it isn’t only the things that became giant blog posts. Of course there was Bali, the French Riviera, Costa Rica, anniversaries, holidays, and eventually a plane ticket that put us in front of each other for real. Those are easy landmarks to point at, but there are countless Second Life nights where nothing particularly noteworthy happened except that we were together, conversations that never became posts, and little memories that probably wouldn’t sound important if I tried to explain them to anyone else.
Those pieces matter just as much to me. They’re how someone goes from being a person you met to becoming woven into your everyday life, and somewhere inside all of them, Mackenzie became my person. Even with all the ways we’ve changed since that first birthday, that part has remained remarkably simple.
That’s also why Teddy Swims ended up making so much sense while I was sitting here trying to figure out what song belonged with this one. Mackenzie loves Teddy, which certainly helps, but “God Went Crazy” is really just this big, unapologetically lovey song about looking at your person and wondering how you got lucky enough to have her. After everything I just spent far too many words trying to explain, I kind of love how uncomplicated that is.
Underneath all of our history, I still look at her that way. I still love her smile and watching her laugh, especially when I’m the reason. I still look at her face sometimes and think about how beautiful she is. I still love the way she fits into my arms, whether that’s in a Second Life photo (lord knows we’ve finally found a size for these that works!) like this one or one of those memories where I finally got to find out what holding her actually felt like. There are a million complicated things I could say about three years of loving somebody, but there is also this incredibly simple one: I’m still crazy about her.
I think Teddy had it right. Somebody took a little extra time.
Right now I get to celebrate another birthday with her. I get to stand here in Second Life holding her in the middle of flowers, giant HAPPY BIRTHDAY balloons, and enough flying confetti that somebody somewhere is eventually going to have to clean all of this up. Not me, though. I’m the photographer. I have responsibilities.
Mostly, I hope this next year is good to her. I hope it gives her a ridiculous number of reasons to smile and considerably fewer reasons to doubt herself. I hope there are things waiting for her that she doesn’t even know she wants yet, more good surprises than bad ones, more days that feel easy, and plenty of moments where she can simply enjoy being happy without wondering what comes after.
More than anything, I hope she keeps becoming who she wants to be. Not the person somebody else expects or the version of herself she thinks she’s supposed to have figured out already, but Mackenzie, whatever that looks like next. And yes, selfishly, I hope I get to be beside her for a whole lot of it.
Three years ago I was trying to make sure there were balloons, confetti, and a cake waiting at a villa in Bali because this girl I had only recently fallen for deserved to walk into something that felt special on her birthday. Last year, I finally got to celebrate her while actually standing beside her. This year we somehow managed to lose each other for a little while, find each other again, and arrive at birthday number four knowing considerably more about ourselves and each other than either of us knew when all of this started.
I don’t think the first version of us would have understood half of that, and I’m kind of glad they didn’t have to. They got to have their Bali trip. They got to stay up until five in the morning. They got excited about every new discovery and believed that wanting something badly enough was probably all it took. We know a little better now, but we also know that sometimes something can be worth choosing again after you’ve learned that choosing it doesn’t automatically make it easy. I think there is something pretty beautiful about that too.
After all of those words, putting the actual photo together was considerably easier. I knew I wanted this one to feel like a birthday the second you looked at it, but I also didn’t want to build some enormous party scene where Mackenzie and I disappeared somewhere in the middle of it. FOXCITY’s Silverlake Meadows Photo Booth gave me exactly the kind of starting point I wanted with the open meadow, flowers, and softer summer feeling, and then I could start making the rest of it feel like her.
Obviously that meant balloons. I used hive’s balloon letters to put HAPPY BIRTHDAY across the scene, and tarte.’s pastel confetti gave me another layer of color moving through the frame. There is already quite a bit happening between the flowers, balloons, and confetti, but somehow it never felt like too much. If anything, I think all of it helped capture the part of this birthday I wanted the photo to hold onto. For all the history I just spent entirely too many paragraphs talking about, celebrating her can still be as simple as letting something be bright, colorful, and happy.
The piece that really decided the photo for me was Ana Poses’ Hush Fatpack, new at The Fifty through August 20. I could have gone with a more traditional couple pose and probably made my life considerably easier, but carrying Mackenzie felt more like us. It’s affectionate without being overly serious; there’s a little bit of playfulness to it, and after writing an entire post about how crazy I still am about this girl, having her in my arms seemed like the appropriate place for her to be.
She also made the color palette incredibly easy to use. She is wearing Belle Epoque’s Normani dress in Yellow, and against all of the green in Silverlake Meadows, it immediately became one of the brightest parts of the frame. She paired it with DEAD DOLL’s Lexi Platform Sandals, new at Collabor88 through September 6, and DOUX’s Estrella Hairstyle, currently new at equal10 through September 5. Between the yellow dress, the platforms, and the long movement of Estrella, everything about her styling felt light enough for the scene without disappearing into everything I had built around her.
Meanwhile, I did what I do remarkably well and wore [Deadwool]. [Deadwool]’s E. tee, currently at The Fifty through August 20, paired with the Dean jeans, kept my side of the styling simple and gave the eye somewhere to rest against everything else happening in the photo. It also meant I wasn’t competing with the birthday girl for attention, which seems like a generally intelligent survival strategy when the entire point of the photo is her.
I think that’s ultimately why this scene worked for me. I didn’t need it to carry all of the complicated parts of the story because the words already did that. The photo could just celebrate Mackenzie. It could be warm and colorful, and a little ridiculous with all the confetti floating around, while still feeling like us. Four birthdays later, apparently all I really needed was a field full of flowers, a few very large balloons, and an excuse to pick her up.
Four birthdays is a strange little milestone because it isn’t one of the anniversaries anybody tells you to make a big deal about, but sitting here looking at this photo, it feels like one to me. There is so much life between that first birthday in Bali and the two people standing in this field now, and I wouldn’t want to erase any of it just to make the story cleaner. All of those versions of us had to exist to get us here. For everything that has changed, I still get to look at this girl in my arms and know exactly why a song like Teddy Swims’ “God Went Crazy” made me think of her. I still think she’s beautiful. She still makes me laugh, still drives me absolutely insane when she puts her mind to it, and after four birthdays, I am still ridiculously happy that I get to love her.
I don’t know where we’ll be when birthday number five rolls around, and, considering our track record, I’m not going to make predictions. I just hope there is another photo, another story to tell, and another reason to come back here and add one more page to everything we’ve already lived. For now, birthday number four gets flowers, balloons, far too much confetti, Teddy Swims, and this version of us. I think that’s a pretty good way to remember it.
Happy Birthday, Mackenzie. I love you. 💜
“You got that smile, babe
You got that subtle Mona Lisa
Drive me wild, babe
I’d give it all up just to keep you by my side”
Teddy Swims – God Went Crazy
Credits:
~Her~
Head: LeLutka EvoX AVALON 4.0 ~ Jaden Nova
Hair: DOUX – Estrella Hairstyle ~ Dam1710 Resident ~ NEW @ equal10 (Aug 10-Sept 5)
Body: [LEGACY] [BODY] (f) Perky Edition (1.7.1) ~ MeshBody Resident
Collarbone Tattoo 1: [Always Never] Birds 75% ~ Dopamine Cloud
Arm Tattoos: HORL – Arm Orn 4 Tattoo [FADED 50] ~ Bree Coy
Hand Tattoos: ALBA – Lore Tattoos Bundle (5 &7) ~ Kaiasalvat Resident
Hand Tattoos: ALBA – Luck Tattoos Bundle (8) ~ Kaiasalvat Resident
Thigh Tattoo: [MI] Bowie ~ LoveeDiamond Resident
Dress: Belle Epoque – Normani – Yellow ~ Janire Belle
Shoes: DEAD DOLL – Lexi Platform Sandals ~ Kiddo Oh ~ NEW @ Collabor88 (Aug 8-Sept 6)
Collar: Kibitz – Hearty diamond collar ~ Kathya Szczepanski
Earrings: Vibing — suckit earrings — silver ~ Luxelitemanager Resident
~Him~
Head: LeLUTKA.Head.NOA.4.0 ~ Jaden Nova
Head Applier: Stray Dog HERVE EVOX TAN (V) NO BROWS ~ Gac Akina
Hair: [MFCNT] THOR Bun – Grooming Hair – LeBarbier Alpha
Hairbase: LeLUTKA.EvoX.Hairbase.044 (BOM) ~ Jaden Nova (Comes with the LeLUTKA NOA Head)
Eyes: [ContraptioN] Depthglass Eye ~ Walton Wainwright
Eyebase: Avi-Glam. Prism Eyes – Pack 2 ~ Eye Daddy
Ears: ^^Swallow^^ Gauged S Ears ~ Luciayes Magic
Ear Tattoo: RichB. Ears Tattoo #08 ~ Salvy Hexem
Beard: [MFCNT] Ducky Skunk Beard & Stache – LeBarbier Alpha
Beard Layer: PHYSIQUE X – Logan Facial Hair (v1) Tintable ~ PhysiqueX Resident ~ NEW @ Manhood (July 27-Aug 21)
Body: [LEGACY] Athletic Edition (1.7.1) ~ MeshBody Resident
Skin: VELOUR: PICASSO HOMME Skin for Legacy (FIT/TAN) Picasso Neck ~ Kiria Mama
Nails: Pare.Cure Mesh Nails Both Hands [Short] – Legacy ~ Flazedo Resident
Torso Tattoo: Boscato Vigor Upper Body Tattoo MEDIUM – Boston Blaisdale
Shirt: [Deadwool] E. tee ~ Masa Plympton ~ NEW @ The Fifty (July 25-Aug 20)
Pants: [Deadwool] Dean jeans ~ Masa Plympton
Rings/Bracelets: *RE* Atreides Bracelet & Rings ~ Crashnoww Resident
Earrings: = DAE = SXD1 ~ Naomi Darkheart
~Scene~
Backdrop: FOXCITY. Photo Booth – Silverlake Meadows ~ Little Snacc
Pose: Ana Poses – Hush Fatpack ~ Fanny Finney ~ NEW @ The Fifty (July 25-Aug 20)
Balloons: hive // balloon letters ~ Lundy Lovely
Confetti: tarte. pastel confetti ~ Alessandra Dallas
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