The Girl Before Crestmont
The night before Crestmont, Sienna Hayes had packed exactly three things:
her suitcase, her camera bag, and absolutely no idea what she was doing.
Which, according to her mother, was “a perfectly normal university experience.”
According to Sienna, normal university experiences did not involve packing up your entire life and moving across the country to one of the most impossible-to-get-into universities in the world.
The funny thing was, Sienna had spent her entire life wanting something bigger.
She just hadn’t expected “bigger” to feel quite so much like standing at the edge of a cliff.
Her parents had always been like that.
They celebrated every achievement like she had personally discovered electricity.
Sienna sometimes found it embarrassing.
Mostly because she secretly loved it.
Sienna would later find out her father had stood outside her bedroom door for almost ten minutes after this.
At the time, she only thought one thing:
her parents were being dramatic.
They would never admit that they were the ones struggling to let go.
The last morning at home was strangely ordinary.
No dramatic speeches.
No movie moment.
Just coffee, bags, and her dad asking if she had packed her charger for approximately the eighteenth time.
Sienna hated photos where she wasn’t ready.
Her dad loved those photos.
According to him, they were the real ones.
The ones where people weren’t trying to look like who they wanted the world to see.
And then, suddenly, she was standing outside Crestmont.
Her parents hugged her a little too long.
Her dad told her to call if she needed anything. Her mum told her three separate times that she loved her.
And then they left.
Which was the part nobody tells you about growing up.
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t leaving. It’s watching the people who raised you walk away.
Sienna had always photographed things when she didn’t know how to process them.
It was easier to capture a moment than admit she was afraid of it.
She didn’t know who Brynhild Haldorsen was.
She didn’t know millions of people followed her.
She didn’t know the girl in the photo was a princess.
She only knew that the light hit her perfectly.
