A two-part diaristic visual essay and farewell to the walls that shaped my early twenties

4 Years, 4 Walls – A Love Letter to Jazz

TOOLS & COLLABORATION

Digital Photography & Written Dialogue, Spring of 2025.

Creative Direction, Practical Set Styling & Modeling: Bahar Goel

Photography, Editing & Written Text: Abdullahi (@rvblv)

This series is an ode to the walls that witnessed my entire early twenties in Toronto. I moved into Jazz in the summer of 2021, twenty years old and knowing almost no one in Toronto. For four years, those walls held every formative shift of becoming who I am—the quietest tears, the sweetest milestones, and the people who drifted in and out along the way. Shot just before packing up to close that chapter, this two-part series was a quiet goodbye to a space that saw everything, in a building I still find my way back to.

Collaborating with writer and photographer Abdullahi, the project merges production styling with poetic prose. Arranged as an ongoing visual dialogue across the intimate corners of the apartment—eating ramen over the sink, sitting with an acoustic guitar, and looking out over the city skyline—the series examines the quiet friction between loneliness, personal unraveling, and the ache of outgrowing a space that shaped you.

Part I — The Unravelling: Reflections on self-doubt, isolation, and the hesitation to accept love during chapters of deep uncertainty.

Part II — The Longing: A quiet confession of what remained beneath the surface—wanting closeness in ordinary, unglamorous domestic moments before moving on.