From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

Last week I glimpsed through the narrow crack between two large metal doors on the third floor of the Museum—the Museum: capitalized, as was our custom—and saw emptiness. The place that once was the resource center is now an empty room, only the streams of light coming in the angled windows, the quiet.

This was the place that my love for art and my love for education met. I remember my first day there, the way it made my heart swell. It was fall. I was just 25, or maybe not even yet, and I was madly in love with life, with the season, with swirling leaves and color and the way everything seemed to be imbued with magic, even the sound of the high heel click on concrete on my walk from the bus, on the marble stairs inside. It seemed my whole wide magical life was laid out in front of me in glittering jeweltones, like the night pavement after rain.

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It was strange to see the bareness, the white walls, the tacked up paper, presumably an exhibition on its way in some distant future. It reminded me (as as everything seems to) of the passage of time, of the way things slip in and out of a life, of the way sometimes the color just fades despite our best attempts to keep it alive, vibrant, stay in love with it, the way something we have worked for and poured ourselves into can slip away into memory, into emptiness. Time can sap as well as swell, and my persistent metaphor is unrelenting; it is the waxing and waning of the moon, the rise and fall of the tide.

This has been a year of the swell, a year of growing and rising, at times fast and sharp, a tidal wave, bursting at the seams. It has been a time of intense gratitude and learning, and the deep searing growing pains that accompany such times. So much good has come into my life since last year at this time. Still, it's hard sometimes, to catch up with all of life's dizzying spinning, to catch my breath after all of the fear and the work and the work and the work.

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That year—the year I started at the museum as an intern— that was the year I found the mark that made me feel like what I was making was art, that my love and my sight could somehow translate to paper, to 2 dimensions, to something others could see and touch, a way I could put a true and real and unedited piece of myself out in the world. I fell in love with ink and skylines and feeling—for the first time—wholly and unabashedly myself.

As the splits and seams heal into stretch marks, rivulets of scars, and the exhaustion begins to abate, I know that this has to be what comes next; I have to find my mark again. I have to find the place in me that is in love with curiosity and truth and the bones beneath the skin, the part of me that is unafraid of all I have to lose, unafraid of all I have to give.