Date
I burst into the Tate twenty minutes late and scattered an open backpack’s worth of shit 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. Red 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 (English square but fluid, Korean a flock of small birds in flight). I brought her Lunch Poems and she bought me a drink.
Then we walked through Guston’s life. She was drawn to reds and figuration dissolving to make room for more. 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 always 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 was a waiter there. Then three 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 ran 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 to unwind in each day. Who had, like me, developed a taste for contradiction; her deeply sensitive and gentle aura belied the image of her hours later outside Waterloo Station, black hair snaking down a black leather jacket toward a super slim smoldering between black fingernails, smoke curling around the shine of her yellow-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.