Gallery

My life is a gallery. The people in it are beautiful and moving. Everything in it speaks to me. But I like it best when I'm alone there. Studying and appreciating the statues of my timeline. I tiptoe through the room silently. Like a dancer performing for an unseen audience they never cared about impressing. There are gossamer white curtains hanging down, pinned up and loosely swaying along with my inner song. The tiles are black and white. Like a giant chessboard. And I'm a piece of this game. Like all the figures in this room. In my life.

I gracefully push the curtains out of my way as I go. Slowly, purposefully spinning and stepping in time with the delicately somber piano echoing in my mind. There's a mirror. One undamaged. Ornate but not overdone. Entrancingly simple. Absolutely perfect. So of course, I gingerly stepped in front of it; what else would I do? Tentatively, I raised my head, and looked the reflection in the eye to face it. 

She looked almost exactly like me. It was surprising. I expected what this unique mirror would show me would be uncharacteristically beautiful or absolutely awful. But it wasn't. I wasn't. I was pleasantly surprised to see myself looking back at me. My hair was a little brighter and curly. My eyes were a little greener. I was a tad taller and had whiter teeth. But overall I was the same. Except for the scar. A noticeable scar ran from my ear around part of my neck. Puzzled, I raised a few fingers and ran them over it. Suddenly I understood why it was there. It was not foreign or the result of some clumsy accident. It was just part of me. Like it had been there since the day I was born. Seamlessly melding with my skin, as if it belonged. And I didn't question it ever again.

I moved out from my mirror alcove back into the gallery. Tiptoeing around these objects of a lifetime. They look so real. Posed driving, acting, writing, smoking, laughing, dancing. The girl across the room from me is the dancer. I smile to look at her. She knows me better than most. Sculpted into immortality with confidence in her grin. But the breeze blows through an undefined window, lifting the curtains. They sway around her for a minute, caressing her vitality. When they settle she seems to be gone. Or blurred. The image of her no longer accessible to me. With a small sense of sadness, I move on. Stepping in time with Time itself. But the first step I try to take, it puts me in front of him.

I am stopped dead in my tracks. I thought this figure, this statue, this work of art had been moved. Moved to a rarely visited corner of the capacious room. Where I couldn't hurt him, and he damn well couldn't hurt me. But here he was. Eternally frozen with that smile on his face, sadness in his stance, and his heart in his hands, outstretched. I didn't know what to do. I wanted to run, but my legs it seemed, had resigned themselves from my control. I wanted to sob, but the sadness was buried too deep to reach my tear ducts. I wanted to take the nearest heavy object and cleave this reminder into a million pieces all over the checkered floor. Mostly I just wanted to hold him and say I'm sorry. To know that we're both alright with moving on, and that there's so much we'll never get to express. But that maybe we could let that go. I reach out. Call it a desperate attempt. A wild goose chase. A pipe dream. A symbol. I just wanted to tell this unmoving, unchanging, unwaivering ghost of the person I used to love everything that I could never say to the flesh and blood copy. Even tell what I've said a million times. 

Hesitantly I extend myself upon the statue; the memorial. I lightly jump up on the base to be close enough to whisper the truth in his stone ear. But when I leaped, my foot connected with checkered tiling. The only reminder of this experience had crumbled to ashen dust at my feet. Just like that. I was crushed. Abandoning grace and beauty I ran, sobbing, to sit at the base of another figure. One who was seated at a desk, smirking, holding a pack of Big Red out to me. But as soon as I put any pressure, any weight, any burden on it; this one disintegrated too. In a paranoid haze of panic I ran around the room; testing all of the seemingly sturdy benchmarks of my past. One after another these enduring, immortalized copies of my milestones and stepping stones crumbled before my eyes. The girl sitting on a swing under the huge oak where we met. The blue-eyed man with a BMW logo emblazoned in his skin and a plea for death across his chest. The red-headed ball of charisma and jokes that caught me in a hug when I collapsed crying at the loss of my love. They all fell at some point. Some sign of stress.

There was only one left. He stood there in a cape, posed in the middle of the room. Holding a tea cup in one hand, and a Beatles album in the other. He had brown shaggy hair that sometimes annoyed him when it fell in his eyes. His perfect eyes. I know it to be impossible, but seemed that this piece of perfection had been in my gallery (whether I was aware of it or not) since the beginning. Slowly I approached. I would surely be in agony if this one were to dissolve into dust and nothing like the others. I liked being in my gallery by myself, but that doesn't mean I wanted to be alone. Five steps away. Then four. Loosing confidence and courage. Until I was there. A step away. But I wasn't ready. I looked around at the room. It was a wasteland of crushed love and collapsed hope. I wanted to believe in these things. These art pieces. These symbols of beauty and light. But looking at these piles of broken still life spread all over the floor; I knew I could not. I stood there for what felt like forever. Maybe it was. Does it really matter? I only moved around when the breeze blew through. It picked up the pieces of my past in its crossfire. And the only remains of my art, my life where whirling around in a subtle dance with nature. I couldn't do anything as I stood there and watched helplessly and hopelessly while it all floated out that undefined and indescribable window. I stood and looked at this statue in the empty room for a long time after.

Finally it was time. I gingerly put a foot on the base. Nothing happened. I stepped up. Still in tact. I hugged it. Not a pile of dust yet. I leaned on it. Solid as a rock. And that was all I needed to know. I climbed up into the statue's arms and leaned against him as I sobbed out the last pieces of my humanity. I eventually fell asleep in his arms, leaning against him; as I, turning to stone myself, finally joined my polished gallery. We were forever after fused. I would eternally lean on him. And he would always be there. Quietly, accepting, and always with a smile on his face. Like he was just happy to be in this room with me at all.