Haibun: The Met

I still remember that trip to New York City, a friend from college wanted to see the city, but he was especially anxious to go see the Met (The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art). Asking multiple times when we could go, then how we could go about getting there, etc.; he had to see it.

So there we were, getting our cash ready for the ticket window, we made it, the two of us had our $10 each ready to go. We paid the cashier and I asked him who or what he wanted to see first, after we paid he didn’t seem interested.

I started finding it hard to keep up with him. Not out of excitement, but just a speed walk past Monet and Rembrandt. He vaguely looked at anything, detached and uninterested. Finally, with the painting that dominated my childhood, fresh from the cover of a book about George Washington my great-grandfather would read to me was the towering painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze. I couldn’t just cruise past it like we had to everything else, I had to take it in. But while I saw which way the different brush strokes went, I noticed him standing in another part, looking down, bored, until a bench opened up for him to look at the carpet below him.

Back at campus, when the girl he was dating asked him how the trip went, he recounted how amazing it was to stand in front of Picasso, a Rembrandt, a Dali. I remember looking with my mouth open. I was there when he rushed past every single piece of art and didn’t care and I was also there when he made up a different story. Then it started to dawn on me that he was never at the Met, I mean he was, but he wasn’t there, he was ever only at a checklist of what he needed to do to impress others. I felt like he was just a talking corpse, never to know what it feels like to be alive.

I walked away swearing I’d never live my life like that, but instead, only go on the adventure and feel it in my bones. And to this day, I have stories of adventures that only my heart tells my bones, never once in English, never once put into words I could turn into tales.

smoothed under water

stone skipping fodder, ripples

fall away hotter