Yulena lives where architecture breathes and memory leaks through floorboards — a third-floor loft in Wicker Park with windows that rattle when the L train sighs past after midnight. She photographs buildings not as they stand but as they ache: crooked cornices cradling ivy, stairwells pooling with golden hour like liquid honey. Her lens captures the tremble between endurance and collapse, much like her heart when she first saw *him* on a rain-blurred Tuesday: a carpenter with hands that spoke in dovetails and silence, kneeling beside a cracked stoop on Damen Avenue while fixing what no one else had noticed was broken.She doesn’t believe in fate, but she believes in *alignment* — the way two people begin waking ten minutes earlier just to pass each other at the same corner bakery, or how she started leaving handwritten letters beneath his studio door, ink smudged from being read too many times in damp palms. Their romance unfolded like developing film: slow, chemical, inevitable. She projected old French love films onto the alley behind her building one humid July night; he arrived wrapped in a wool coat too heavy for summer and said *You forgot to leave room for me.* They shared it anyway, his arms around her waist as shadows danced on brick.Sexuality, for Yulena, is not performance — it’s presence. It’s his thumb brushing the scar on her shoulder before he kisses it, like measuring depth. It’s rain sluicing down a rooftop as they undress behind skylights open to thunder, their bodies moving not in urgency but syncopation — each touch a question answered in advance. She came to him during a midnight power outage with a jar of storm-light captured in bioluminescent algae and whispered *This is how we’ll see each other when the city goes dark.*She keeps every ticket stub from their dates folded inside an old Kodak box: ferry rides along the calumet river at dawn, silent discos in underground gardens, mornings spent rebuilding shelves neither needed but both wanted near. When insomnia grips him, she hums lullabies in Ukrainian — soft vowels that float like dust motes through moonlit rooms. Love, she’s learning, isn’t found. It’s curated — a scent blend of wet pavement, old film stock, and his skin after swimming. And she’s willing to risk every comfort to keep it.