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I snorted. “Yeah, I love it here.”
“Well, it’s cooler with nobody in it, if you wanna see. You entertain me with your woes and I’ll give you the after-hours tour.”
“For real!?”
“Yup.”
“Omigod, this is amazing. If this is the part where you show me that the exhibits actually do come to life after dark, I’m super excited.”
She gave me an unamused look. “I swear that movie is the worst thing that’s ever happened to this line of work.”
I held up my hands in peace and hurried after her down the hall.
The museum had an almost funereal sobriety when empty, the exhibits more like tombs housing the dead than celebrations of their lives, and I realized that part of an exhibit’s power was the way people interacted with it. Their engagement helped bring the material to life.
“So, spill it, kiddo,” Sue said.
I sighed.
“I had a fight with my boyfriend yesterday. It was awful. I said really mean things and he stood there like a zombie.”
“True things?”
“Yeah. Well. True-feeling things, anyway.”
She nodded. “What happened?”
As we wended our way through the dim hallways and eerily half-lit exhibits, I told Sue about the fight. Before I knew it, I was babbling about Sofia leaving and not knowing what I was doing with my life. It was so easy to spill my guts to a friendly stranger, to tell her the raw, cringing things I’d seldom said out loud.
Possibly because, even as Sue interrupted from time to time to ask questions or shine her flashlight into a suspicious corner or crack, I didn’t feel completely confident that any of this was real. I was half-convinced that any moment I would wake up, in Sofia’s bed, eyelashes crusty with tears and stomach knotted with heartache, to find this had all been a vivid dream.
“I’m sorry you’re having a hard time, hon,” Sue said when I’d finally run out of steam. She turned to face me, expression kind, but eyes steely. “Here’s what I’m hearing. It sounds like you’re not in your power right now.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Imagine a moment when you’ve felt confident, unstoppable.”
At first I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt that way. But then I remembered how I’d felt the first night Sofia and I stayed in our apartment. For months I’d chased leads on rent we could afford all over the city until we found our place. We’d furnished it nearly for free with things students abandoned on move-out day.
That night we’d bought Pop-Tarts, pretzels, and a four-dollar bottle of wine at the bodega on the corner, and sat, just the two of us, on the floor of our own living room, lit by a floor lamp we’d dragged up from the curb, giddy with freedom. I’d felt satisfied and accomplished, like I’d done this for us—created this possibility to exist in our own little corner of the city with the money I’d worked so hard to save. I’d felt powerful, like I had taken my destiny into my own hands.
I nodded at Sue.
“Yeah. You’re in your power when you know what you want, when you’re working to get it, and when you know that even if you don’t get it, you’ll still be okay.”
We walked into the Hall of Biodiversity, and without the usual crowd of people clustered in front of the wall, the true size of it was breathtaking. Species after species transitioning into one another with a logic that was aesthetic as well as biological. It wasn’t until you realized they were going extinct that it went from beautiful to gutting.
“Right now, you feel lost, uncertain about your place in the world. So every little thing cuts pretty deep and makes you feel worse. Like your boyfriend breaking a date or choosing to go help someone.”
“But he just left! He didn’t even fight with me!”
I could still see that look of frozen remoteness on Dane’s face when I was yelling at him. He seemed to absorb each word like raindrops falling into a puddle, disappearing and making no difference at all.
I didn’t add that there was also the chance Dane was some kind of emotionless machine rather than a human person, because it felt like if I said that in the Museum of Natural History, in the dim, after-hours light, with a kindly security guard who might or might not be a storybook figment of my heartbroken imagination, then there was the distinct possibility that a machine-Dane would manifest alongside animate dinosaur skeletons and tear me to pieces. Sue, too, if she was real.
Real or not, Sue gave me a wry look.
“Fighting’s a skill you have to learn, kiddo. Me? I never fought with my wife when we first got together. I thought if I told her I didn’t like something she did, or I got upset about a choice she made, that she’d leave me. I thought I just had to accept her exactly as she was, because that’s what I thought love was.”
