This moved me.
(me, in Anish Kapoor’s Untitled, at the High Museum of Art last week)
Usually we don’t have the ability to see when we’re turning a corner. Something happens and it doesn’t feel momentous but later we can look back and see it as the point at which things started to turn—at which a chapter ended, or a leaf blew over and never reversed. Usually we walk right through these gates, not realizing they are gates at all, not realizing we lucked into the right code or made the mistake of turning down the wrong driveway.
Usually this is a good thing. If you don’t know you are going through something important you can’t second-guess it. You can’t regret it before it happens. You can’t overwhelm it with yourself, with your own head in the mirror in the way of it all.
Lately I have been unable to drive down any road without seeing every crack in the sidewalk lining it, every smallest shrub that marks the beginning of a division between we could live here and we could never live here. I have been carrying groceries and felt the rough parts of every single orange in every single plastic bag. One night almost six months ago, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed awake until dawn. I didn’t know that I knew what was happening but I knew what was happening.
There is a moment when you are driving into Los Angeles from the east when you can see the buildings all lit-up and silhouetted from a long way off between the hills. Los Angeles is cruel like that. It is the kind of place that takes its clothes off for you in another room at the end of the building, all aglow in some stupid soft light, and says this is what I have for you, and this is where you are going to be, and then disappears as you try to navigate the twisted hallways and elevator shafts and crowded foyers between the two of you.
It is not always a blessing to be aware of the fact that you are standing on the very end of a long diving board in a small red bathing suit and that you will never be back on this diving board, never, that the expanse of water below you is something new entirely and something that will eventually become home, but right now you have no idea what it will feel like when it hits your skin, will it be warm or cold, will it be full of fish, will there be salt in your eyes, will it have a current that can carry you over. Will it reflect you whole or in fragments. Will it piece you together again.
