2 April 2024 (originally written 26 January 2024)
Date
I burst into the Tate late enough to panic-scatter the contents of my backpack across the museum’s concrete floor. She glided over, put her hand on my shoulder and suggested the rooftop lounge to decompress before the show.
We leaned over London as it spiked a pink sunset. An isosceles skyscraper burned white with mirrored light like the tip of a giant utility knife. Construction cranes flamingoed across the expanse. We talked about the world as a petri dish, humans sprouting and returning to the earth like bacteria, and how mystifying it is for a character to be written into another’s life with no exposition. We compared the shapes of our languages and flipped through Lunch Poems.
Then we walked through Guston’s life. She was drawn to reds and figuration dissolving. I felt something devotional in his centered symbols and a spark from what he said about unnumbing oneself to brutality (though in her presence I realized it also applied to tenderness). She moved quickly through the room until she became glued, just like I do.
I chose a place for dinner that was a walk away, and as we approached it she let out a sharp laugh—turned out her twin waited tables there. Then hours evaporated. Her name held “the beauty of art” in Korean. Nature was her Great Creator. She also left home for perspectives she couldn’t conceptualize at the time.
Her sister’s boyfriend worked at a hotel bar down the street. On the way there, the moon was intensely full. A luminous silver retina. It watched us through the lobby’s glass facade as we clinked lagers. I learned about someone who had, like me, spent incalculable hours shaping solitude into a home. Who had, like me, developed a taste for contradiction; her deeply sensitive aura belied the image of her hours later outside Waterloo Station, umber hair snaking down a leather jacket toward a super slim smoldering between black fingernails, smoke curling around the shine of her amber-brown eyes.
At the bar, she kept accidentally kicking me under the table when she would cross her legs, instinctively apologizing each time. After the third sorry, I told her she was in fact allowed to touch me and offered my hand on the tabletop. She slowly scanned my palm lines, then pressed her fingers into them for a blink of charged silence. I asked her what she was thinking. Then I felt my corners round as she re-met my gaze and told me the truth.