For the week I had planned to spend finding footage for this project—footage that would go along with the storyboard I wrote for it—I ended up flying to Puerto Rico with the majority of my quite large family. Parts of my family that hadn’t seen each other in years gathered in Ponce for one person: my grandfather. We were celebrating what we were told would likely be his last birthday.

After hours of Premiere Pro tutorial videos and scrambling to find meaning in footage of my family that I felt could relate to my project, I didn’t feel that what I had finished with was representative of the amount of work I’d put into it. I preferred for people not to see it. I’m not embarrassed of my work; I just don’t want my peers to see work that I don’t feel is ready for presentation. I guess it’s just what you’d expect from someone who changes their shirt thrice a day.

The video essay is meant to explore a simple idea: that what is on the outside does not always reflect what is on the inside. Instead of the footage I had meant to find, most of the footage is of my time in Puerto Rico with my family, spending a week together in a way my family never had before. Though it was my grandfather’s wish to see his island one more time with his family, the journey was not a sad one, and the essay, I hope, reflects that.