“I’m seventeen” is what I said but “please let me in as a child even though I have never felt further from being one” is what I meant.

A HOLY PLACE

Admission to the art museum was still free for me at seventeen, allowing it to all too easily become my holy land when all other relics were lost in that year of ruin.

I didn’t yet know where all of those days spent staring at art would take me, only that they felt like home.

I used to ditch my last class period to sneak off to that temple every chance that I got, walking through the doors, pressing my combat boots to the marble steps, ascending the stairwell to what felt like being in the presence of god.

Renaissance to Realism. Portraits. Sometimes classical piano danced on my eardrums and sometimes I embraced the silence. No matter what, I felt removed from all that hurt me. I felt at one with the wandering elderly and ever-suspicious, fellow black turtle-neck loving workers that seemed to wonder why I could never get enough of the place.

Something about the aura of art, the white noise, the echo of transcendence that rattled through the halls. I always felt like I belonged there.

FALLING IN LOVE WITH ART

Slowly pacing the halls, I walked through centuries, novels, the lives and visions of people long gone and what they awaken in those still here. In me.

I went there to spiritually reset, to come back to myself. In a way, the silent echoes of the walls rung nostalgic from my religious-schooled childhood. There was something so reverent about hushed tones and shared admiration, shared awe.

But there was one room that I loved the most.

It was small and dark with one bench resting against the back wall, in front of a digital display of art that ran on a loop. It was an artistic visual film of sorts dedicated to fate and the role it plays in our lives. I remember that.

The space was quaint, but made infinite through mirrored walls that offered up an illusion of things going on forever. You would sit down and suddenly hear the voices of angels serenading you from the speakers as colorful abstracts unfolded themselves before your eyes.

It was nothing short of mesmerizing. You felt as if you were levitating, suspended in something that you couldn’t quite understand. It called you back again and again and again.

AN OLD JOURNAL ENTRY

I wrote this in my journal the first time I ever found that room:

“A room glowed in darkness and upon stepping inside my jaw fell open. A small space that reached on forever through parallel mirrors. Three screens on one wall displayed mesmerizing motions of fluid art. The three fates, the daughters of Zeus. Each one represented by a screen in one sobbing image of beauty.

I floated inches above the ground and without words a space was made for me on the bench. I sat there in silence with a very old woman and a middle aged couple and we shared the moment together, each through their own perspective. The three fates and the three stages of life. I watched liquid hands wrap around an eyeball and thought of how hard we try to hold onto what we see. The desperation in the grapple of curiosity. And I cried.”   

– January 2020

I remember sitting there in that room, trying to write in the dim light but giving up as tears began to form in my eyes. I never understood why I was crying, only that I was. Only that I couldn’t move, couldn’t leave, could barely notice the people that would come and go as the visual danced before my eyes.

It was the first time that art truly injected itself into my body, staining me with a passion for something that I would only come to better understand as the years unfolded.

JUST THE BEGINNING

For now, four years later, I have somehow found myself writing as an editorial intern for an art magazine in New York City, an endeavor that feels full circle to those first tears that fell within that sacred museum. I am studying all of these avant-garde photographers, getting to follow and write about their work, falling down rabbit holes and never minding if I find my way out.

Coming to the end of college has been a frightening thing because I find so much meaning and purpose in the work that I do there. It fulfills me, inspires me, and connects me to things that feel important. I worried that entering the workforce would sever me from all of that, that I wouldn’t be able to find a job that inspired me in the same way.

This internship has proven me so wrong.

Writing about these artists and their work makes time stand still. I forget where I am and that anything else matters. I can’t believe that jobs like that exist, that people actually get paid to do the thing that makes me feel most alive. And that I, hopefully, eventually, will too.

Suddenly, the thought of graduating is not frightening anymore. It doesn’t feel so heavy.

Things don’t feel like they are ending anymore, but rather maybe just beginning.

Happy Sunday. 🤍

Love, M.

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