Have you ever seen the sun shooting down 5th Avenue at 8pm in June?

Have you reached out and touched all of that golden light with your bare hands?

Have you seen the way that it falls upon and stains the world so delicately, so ephemerally that even the hot dog stand is but a mound of transient light?

I hadn’t.

I had never seen the sun set exactly like that. In California, it blankets. In the city, it is a laser beam. Or the giant string lights hanging from a hot dog cart that looked so odd and artful that I stopped foot traffic to take a photo. I looked around at all of this and felt the city swarming around me, feeling the undeniable carnivalesque playground that it becomes at 6pm on a Friday.

But that was all after—after I went to the MoMA.

A NIGHT FOR NEW YORKERS

Living in New York is like being part of a club. A very special, very terrible, very beautiful club.

You gain access to secret events and places that you use to justify the cost of living here. Like how on the first Friday of the month, the MoMA closes for a private event, reserved for New Yorkers. Free resident’s night. The MoMA is one of my favorite museums here, but one of the few that doesn’t grant residents free access all of the time. Instead, I have recently learned, they throw us a party every month.

After having to confiscate my only true constant companion, my pepper spray, to the flirty security guard at the door on the way in, I stepped into a space that had little resemblance to the one I waded through two summers ago. I don’t know what I was expecting, or why I thought it would be anything short of what it was, but oh my god.

There’s a pop-up bar in the center of the first floor and a a DJ off to the side. People are dancing in front of an enormous wall of animated art as it changes colors, bathing the room in different moods. To the right is the iconic wall of glass that reaches stories high and leads out to the courtyard. There is a sea of people, but not too many. No bumbling tourists or screaming children. It strikes me then that they are all New Yorkers. Perhaps more striking was the realization that—so was I. Sipping red wine in the middle of the MoMA on a balmy night in June.

The thing about going places alone is that you realize how few other people do it. Everyone is in safety groups or pairs, clinging to each other while I just stand there, having long since ceased to feel the awkwardness of solitude. I was too amazed. It was like one of Gatsby’s parties.

GATSBY-ESQUE

I got wine from the pop-up bar because, simply put, drinking wine in an art gallery in nyc is not an opportunity one passes up on.

The bartender tries to sell me the sangria to which I insist I don’t like, even though that’s not true. It was just what came out when I thought of how the last time I had sangria was at sixteen in Ocean Beach when my friend and I decided to brew it ourselves. Or about how her mother found it in her closet a week later and made her do dishes for a month and how she told every family friend the comical story about her daughter for months to get a laugh. Still gets mine. From sixteen and clamoring for any illicit beverage we could find in our flared jeans and salty hair, to twenty-one and ordering wine, all legal-like, amongst fine art. I thought of how there is both tragedy and triumph within that. Heartache and sweetness, all mingling together in the space between.

I took my wine to the party and absorbed everything. The people stretched out on couches like kids at a kickback. The fashion. Oh my god the fashion. The warm breeze that swirled through the courtyard. The music. The strangeness that still pervades me every time I drink legally out in the world, as if a part of me is still just sixteen, parched for criminality. Now, they don’t even check my ID. How boring.

Anyway.

I discover that drinks are only allowed within that area so I drink it quite quickly and climb the stairs towards what turned into another full circle moment. I wandered into a dark room with a long bench and multiple screens of various sizes displaying film clips. I sat down and had a full-body flashback to the little room I loved more than anything back home. The one that sat on the second floor of the art museum that I would hide away in every chance I got. It had three rectangular screens and I would sit in front of them for hours, tears in my eyes for reasons I could never understand entirely. Some things are ineffable. I remember loving the feeling of when other people would join and you would all just be sitting there in silence, experiencing dynamic art.

FLOATING THROUGH THE MoMA

I sat there in that room in the MoMA and thought of that seventeen year old kid and the graduation I have gone through to get from there to here. How floored she would be. People passed in and out and no one knew me. I did not know them. Our stories were bound by art but separated by silence, anonymity, and the seemingly vast differences. But despite those differences, if you were in that room, you could see so clearly that there’s a larger, human story. You could feel it’s pulse. I think we all did.

I kept wandering, finding the film installations to be a favorite. Whether it was the wine or all the moments of memory, I felt out of body. I think I began to float. I remember visiting the MoMA two summers ago and being slightly underwhelmed. I preferred the mess of New York to the neatness of the galleries. Their immensity and beauty was undeniable, but not surprising. You expect it. This is still largely true. But something was different this time. Whether the wine, the lack of tourists, or the eye for art that writing for an art magazine has gardened, it was nothing short of a religious experience. I just kept thinking, humans did this. Humans with something so violent and aching and beautiful within them that they could do this. You think about that and you just, float.

In thinking of the last time I was within those walls, I pulled out my phone to check the date of that trip. I had a feeling, ya know? A feeling that it might have been this very same day because that was the kind of night I was having. One where things felt simply unreal. My mouth fell open as I pulled up a photo from that day and saw June 7, 2022 at the top of it. How is that even possible. What are the chances? Same exact day, two years later, by pure accident.

IN THE GOLDEN HOUR

Time escaped me and we were all spit back out onto the streets of New York.

By then, the golden light was pouring down the streets like a river of honey. It was surreal. I walked through that light for a long time, realizing I haven’t seen the sun set in a while. That way to California. This way to the place where you were from. Follow the glowing orange bulb and there you are, a little girl, playing in the aurulent light.

It all felt staged, unreal, impossibly beautiful. The amount of daylight still wringing itself out of the sky at that hour, the taxis honking their way to somewhere, the concrete and glass, and my feet on the pavement. My hands, open to all of that light. And it was enough. It was so much.

I took the train home in a trance. When it pulled into the station, the warm, metallic air fluttered through my hair, and I closed my eyes to feel it all. When I opened them I was walking home through Brooklyn, seeing everyone out on their stoops with friends, laughter echoing up into the trees. Silverware clinked on plates from nearby restaurants, the cacophony of distant conversation fluttering in my ears.

And then there was me, standing on the street corner under my favorite brick townhome, staring up at the somehow-still-blue sky. Just barely. The final drops of daylight dripping into my hair as I walked.

Some things are not what you imagined. They are better and they are worse and they are an infinite array of other undefinable experiences that all add up to something.

Something like this.

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