The Met

We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday. After breaking off from each other, we meandered around all of the exhibits. The second and third floors of the Met, the modern art galleries, are virtually silent. I can hear the soft padding of one person behind me and the clging of heavy shoes against marble stairs. These floors are left to the wanderers, to the people not looking for some specificity out of the experience, who are not being told to go to x, y, and z paintings. The wheezing of the elevator, a single bright note, a murmur of a couple of words thudding against the white walls surround me. The thump of my heart beat reverberates through my body and I can feel it pulsing through the backside of my knees and in my fingertips. Everything is deadened and there’s a fuzzing behind my ears. Every individual blue knob in the carpet blends together. People trickle through, drop by drop. Only the brush of their jeans lets me know where to find them within the room. There’s a skylight in the ceiling, but it is covered up by a thin curtain. I can’t even see the blue of the sky.