about create memories

create memories is built on a simple idea: the most interesting life is not the busiest one, or the most optimized - it’s the most attentive one.

This is a publication about curiosity, culture, and the small details that make life feel larger. Through weekly letters, cultural curation, and travel journals, we explore the things that expand the mind, put words to feelings we’re all secretly having, and make you look at your own life, and the world around you, a little differently.

The world gives us amazing material every day. This is where we make sense of it.

what you’ll find here

🌿 letters from a friend

Every week I write a letter - on anything. A lesson from an ordinary Tuesday, something a place taught me that I’m still thinking about, the thing I noticed on a walk that turned into something larger once I started writing it down.

Some letters are light, some go a little deeper. All of them are written from the heart, like a letter from a friend who noticed something and couldn’t keep it to herself.

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→ start with this letter:

the light came back, as it always does

Cristina Marie

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Mar 26

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💌 the friday five

Five things that genuinely stopped me in my tracks that week - art, music, film, books, cultural rabbit holes, the occasional remarkable person you’ve never heard of. The kind of things you forward to someone before you’ve even finished reading.

The friday five is meant to spark ideas, start conversation - bring something back, tell me what you think - that’s the whole point, so we can share and build on ideas together.

→ start with this friday five:

five things i found interesting this week

Cristina Marie

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Mar 13

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✈️ notes from elsewhere (coming soon)

Travel has shaped almost everything about how I see the world - living out of a suitcase for months at a time, immersed in cultures completely different from mine, surrounded by languages I don’t speak. Every place taught me something about how people have figured out how to live, and I’ve been writing it down ever since.

notes from elsewhere alternates between photo essays - the feeling of a place told through images and small stories - and living guides written the way I’d write to a close friend who’s going somewhere I love: here’s what you actually need to know when you get there.

who this is for

The person who slows down in a city to read the name above an old shop door. Who keeps a running list of things they want to understand more deeply. Who would rather spend four days understanding one place than photograph twenty from a distance.

The person who travels to understand rather than to cross off. Who suspects the most interesting version of life is found slightly off the main road.

a little about me

Hi, I’m Cristina Marie 🤍 writer, photographer, former Neuro Rehab nurse, based in Salt Lake City - a city with mountains that catch the light in a way that still stops me mid-walk.

I grew up between cultures, which gave me an early sense that the world is wider than any one place can show you. Music was my first language for understanding that. I spent years performing, studying it seriously, and still believe it’s one of the most honest ways people connect across distance and difference.

I spent years after that caring for patients at the edge of their lives. People who’s worlds had changed in an instant, who would have given anything for another ordinary Tuesday. Over and over again, with so much pain behind their eyes, these patients and their families, would ask me the same question:

are you actually living the life you have?

Those words are the reason this publication exists.

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After years of nursing, I made the hard, necessary decision to step away. My husband and I packed everything into storage and started traveling slowly - for extended periods, immersed in places that had nothing to do with who I’d been.

It was disorienting, yet clarifying at the same time. Writing was the thing that kept me making sense of it all.

→ to read more about the why:

for the patients who told me to never stop living

Cristina Marie

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Feb 22

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create memories grew out of that - out of the realization that the most alive version of life requires staying curious, and finding people who want to do the same thing.

This is that place. And it only gets better when more people bring things to the table.

So, come in, look around, stay as long as you like.

Thank you for being here 🤍

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your new friend,

Cristina Marie 🤍