The Gaze Behind the Pages

Photo by L&G Portraits

There are stories that feel alive — so vivid that they begin to look back at you.

This photo captures exactly that moment. The moment when fiction and reality blur, and a novel becomes more than words on paper — it becomes a presence.

In my hands, my very first book “Pasaulis Tau skolingas ateitį...” ("The World Owes You a Future..."). It is not just a book. It’s a world suspended between hope and despair, beauty and fragility. It tells of a young woman chasing meaning through chaos, searching for her place in a world that promises everything and yet takes so much.

The photo by L&G Portraits invites the viewer closer — to that precise heartbeat between the reader and the story. The covered half of the face symbolizes the part of us that hides behind the books we love — the side that dares to feel deeply but rarely shows it.

Soon, this novel will speak to a wider audience — as "The World Owes You a Future..." will soon be available in English. And when it does, it will carry with it the same haunting question that lingers in the eyes of this portrait: What does the world truly owe us — and what do we owe ourselves?

Through the lens, the book is not just seen; it is felt.

Every shadow, every reflection, every silent gaze reminds us that stories like this one are not meant to be read once — they are meant to stay, quietly, beneath the skin.

“Big Dreams in Small Steps”

Photo by Lens.Wide.Shut

Big dreams rarely arrive with grand gestures — they begin quietly, with a first, almost hesitant step.

This image captures that truth with elegant simplicity: a diary that holds the promise of tomorrow, and a pair of high heels — symbols of ambition, grace, and perseverance.

We often imagine success as a confident stride, but in reality, it’s more like walking in heels — balanced, measured, and refined. Each small step demands intention, patience, and poise. Each mark on the page, each note in your diary, becomes one of those steps toward something larger.

Because whether you’re walking toward a goal or writing your next chapter, what truly matters isn’t how quickly you move — it’s that you keep walking, one graceful step at a time.

Big dreams start with small steps… and sometimes, the most elegant steps lead the farthest.

“A Letter to the Past”

 Photo by Lens.Wide.Shut

A quiet Sunday morning.

The light is soft, hesitant as if afraid to disturb the silence.

A cup of coffee, the scent of ink, the weight of thoughts waiting to be written down.

Before me lies “Noted with Gratitude. Your Gratitude Journal.”

It opens with an invitation to pause, to look back, and to write a letter to the one I used to be. The one who stumbled, dreamed, doubted, and kept walking anyway.

For a moment, the pages hold both of us — the past and the present, the one who didn’t yet know, and the one who finally understands.

Gratitude has a sound — quiet, like morning light touching paper.

And in that stillness, writing becomes a kind of forgiveness.

“In Between Departures”

 Photo by Lens.Wide.Shut

A quiet hotel morning — the kind that exists somewhere between stillness and motion.

The suitcase is half-zipped, the coffee half-finished. But for a moment, she pauses.

In her hands, her special Diary. The pages open somewhere mid-May — a place between what has already passed and what is yet to come. Outside, the world is waiting. Inside, so is she.

There’s something sacred in these small pauses — the ones before the next journey, before the next decision, before the next version of herself begins.

A woman with her diary and a pair of heels.

Not rushing — just aligning her thoughts with the day ahead.

Because even in motion, elegance begins with stillness.

Story: “Written in the Shape of a Heart”

Photo by Lens.Wide.Shut

There are many ways to speak of love — in words, in silence, in the spaces between sentences.

Here, love takes the shape of a heart made from pages — simple, fragile, and infinite at once.

Each fold of the paper whispers of moments that matter: a letter never sent, a dream still becoming, a truth written just for yourself. It is a reminder that love, much like writing, is an act of creation — it asks for presence, for patience, for the courage to begin on a blank page.

This heart was not drawn; it was written into being.

Because sometimes, love doesn’t live in grand gestures — it hides quietly between the lines.

Between the light and the words

Photo by Lens.Wide.Shut

There are moments when stories wait in silence — stacked, still, untouched — until someone reaches for one and lets the light fall upon its pages.

Behind the lamp’s soft glow, a figure lingers — the author, the dreamer, the quiet witness to her own creation.

She walks away, but her words remain — dozens of them, resting in the hush of paper, whispering to whoever dares to listen.

Each book on that table carries a pulse.

A fragment of thought, a shadow of emotion, a flicker of a life that once passed through ink.

And there, between the light and the leaving, the story begins again.

The Silence Between Words...

Photo @lens.wide.shut

Shhh… Do you hear it?

The silence. The whisper of thoughts rising from the farthest corners of the soul...

Whispers of love and hate. Of pain, joy, passion, and the cold calm found after all the storms.

Of the winding paths through the worlds we create ourselves—only to lose our way in them, so that we may find ourselves again.

On the table lie books—thoughts that have already taken form. And a mask.

Not to hide behind. Quite the opposite.

It’s there to remind us that sometimes only behind a mask can we dare to speak differently, as if in another language.

Here, the mask isn’t a symbol of deceit.

It is a mark of courage. A reminder that even when we hide behind ornate patterns, we can still be naked in our words.

For her, the mask is the world of the story she writes. When she puts it on, she becomes part of that world because only by living inside it can she tell the truth within it.

The mask stands guard, protecting the fragility of the written page. It silently watches over the words spilled into ink—footprints of a soul trying to free itself.

This is not a stage. Not a theatre.

This is a writer’s world—a place where silence becomes a story, where every thought seeks its word, and every mask hides not her face, not her nature, but the feeling too powerful to contain. She releases it onto the white pages for her reader, baring her soul through the act of creation.

And when the final sentence fades, only a whisper remains... the same whisper of silence, once more rising from the farthest corners of the soul...

The One Who Stays Between the Pages...

Photo by Lens.Wide.Shut

On the table — a few silent volumes. And on them — her hand.

Not a model’s hand, but a writer’s. The kind that creates worlds… and then quietly decides to stay in them.

She sits between light and shadow — the very place where words are born. Her body is only a silhouette in that half-light, yet her thoughts are vivid, like ink traces pressed deep into the paper.

She’s just finished a sentence — perhaps the last of the story she’s carried for years.

She holds her mask, the one that lets her slip into the world of her characters so deeply that sometimes it’s hard to find her way back.

When you write from the soul, you always leave a piece of yourself behind — the part that stays, quietly, between the pages.

Outside, it’s day. Inside, it’s night. But it is in that night that she finds her voice. In writing, she becomes them all — the one who loves, the one who loses, the one who struggles to remain.

She, who writes.

She, who hides in the flash of light to live in the dark.

She, the one who stays between the pages.

She sat in silence, as if engaged in a quiet conversation with her own thoughts...

Photo by Lens.Wide.Shut

On the table before her, steam curled gently from a white porcelain cup. It was so light, so fragile — and yet, within that fragility, it seemed capable of holding her entire world. She watched the rising steam, and it felt as though her thoughts were lifting with it — from the stillness, from the past, from the words that had never been spoken.

Behind her lay countless stories — some written, others resting quietly in the hidden corners of her heart. Every moment, every sentence, every silence was like a page she continued to read to herself.

She sipped her coffee slowly — not because there was nowhere to be, but because she didn’t want to lose what lingers in a single pause: calmness, lightness, the taste of quiet.

Perhaps to an onlooker, it was just a morning, a cup of coffee, and a woman deep in thought. But in truth, it was a whole world — the birthplace of stories.

Coffee and a book – two inseparable worlds…

Photo by Lens.Wide.Shut

One awakens the body, the other – the soul. The coffee is still hot, yet her thoughts are frozen.

This photograph captures the moment before the word — before another chapter, another memory, another attempt to understand why life sometimes shatters just when you think you’ve finally learned to hold it together.

She is not searching for meaning anymore, only for what remains around her after the loss. She sits at her desk, as she does every day, surrounded by sketches — as if waiting for him to return. For the coffee to taste sweet again. For the words to grow lighter. But her world is made of shadows now, a silent testimony to what once was, to what she will never again allow in, to what she tries to guard herself against.

In her life, there is no faith that everything will be alright. There is only what she creates.

And she creates beauty — beauty that rises from the darkness of her memories, beauty that surfaces in the brief triumph of a fragile moment, beauty that carries the echo of everything she cannot let go.

Within these pages — a woman whose pain has turned into words…

Very soon my very first novel The World Owes You a Future... in English...

She Stood Where the Light Could Not Touch Her

Photo by Lens.wide.shut

She never chased the spotlight. She simply stepped into the room, and the light rearranged itself around her.

Even here, she looked like a woman carved from the idea of elegance itself. Pearls rested on her as if afraid to slip from their duty. Nothing about her asked for attention, yet everything demanded it.

People imagined that her isolation was a performance. For her, it was oxygen.

Behind the soft blur of shadow lay the steel of a woman who understood the cost of greatness. She had learned long ago that visibility was a luxury, but not an illusion. True power lived in the unseen, in the quiet spaces where decisions reshaped destinies.

The world thought they knew her story. They did not know the nights she spent plotting her escape from smallness. The mornings when she stitched herself together with resolve. The years when she was nothing but discipline, and a rising name.

But now… now she stood poised at the edge of her own myth.

Here, you cannot quite see her face, and that is the point, because she was not made to be observed; she was made to be seen.

A shadow, yes. But a shadow that built an empire.