Curated

In a crowded space covered in mishmash frames, there's a bench, the kind your feet are always grateful for when walking through the twisting halls of a museum. While the borders of what's on the wall are scuffed and splattered with mysterious colors of paint, the bench is somehow pristine, a plush green velvet that's not mussed at all. When sitting, and looking around, there's a breeze blowing from a window that provides some light, a breeze that stirs up the musty air looking for a place to settle and dwell on stress. A breeze that feels like the one that blows on my bad days, the breeze I feel while overlooking my city from a hillside.

The clickity-clack of a sainted keyboard comes from somewhere, cutting through the silence. On the cream-colored walls (the same shade of the birthday cake frosting made by my mother) is a range of scraps and pictures that have been squirreled away, tucked into safekeeping. In a gilded frame sits a scribbly mess of marker from when I first grabbed a Crayola product, a monument actually stored in a tub of kid drawings saved from the recycling by sentimentality. A memory, flickering in the starlight of that evening with stove-made s'mores, tasting of inside rather than woodsmoke. Bundled away from the chill, face lifted to the sky, taking the snapshot that hangs now. A melding of the Milky Way and fireflies, blurring the horizon in the dark.

Pawprints of pets dead and alive, cloth of baby blankets made by great-grandmothers, a shadowboxed pair of tiny Sketchers TwinkleToes, ones that I was so proud of. Jelly sandals, flowers pressed in a dusty phonebook one humid summer by my grandmother, a stick of the gum I always stole from my grandfather. Scars earned from childhood escapades, mental maps of my elementary school, the sound a new book makes when the spine cracks from a first opening. On a central wall, in a frame more meant for a Renaissance piece sits the feeling of a summer evening, driving in the pinkish sun while the radio statics in and out. Next to it, the smell of fall leaf piles. The chocolate-covered faces of my cousins at Easter, smearing their picture-ready clothes in Hershey kisses and Rolos. Then, the crisp winter air inhaled by a rosy nose as a sled starts to take flight. 50's music after dark, a strange echoing of jive that just feels different than it does in the day time. Scars earned from childhood escapades, mental maps of my elementary school,

In a storage closet overflowing with a bulk of geometry papers that have consumed many a tree lurks the child-like enjoyment of learning, buried. It's the kind of thing you don't open, for fear of a tsunami of responsibility tumbling out on top of you. Like a sloppy closet filled to the brim with toys that were supposed to be put away; don't ask, don't tell.

But nobody goes to a gallery for the storage closet, and certainly not for the smaller stuff, the stuff deemed only special enough to be tucked by a door. The stuff of creeping worry, the trapped negativity slamming against the picture glass, seething and storming, trying to bust the lightbulbs of the glaring overhead lights. The feeling of being yelled at by a community pool's lifeguard, of failing, of making the mistakes I torment myself for. Worries, ignored, a headache of a piece whose message is too strenuous to figure out, streaks of angry red crossing an anxious onyx like a Polluck.

Through gritting my teeth enough to make my jaw sore, I work through it, ignoring the storage space of doom, the stuff I tuck away behind doors. Working through a trudging winter, a dry cold, a heap of requirements. Wrapped in blankets, frantically texting for human contact, tearing up at the occasional hug. And so, in that gallery that smells of morning coffee and fabric softener, I fall back on good memories. The kind of recallings that take precedent over the lurking bad, the kind preserved, curated, as if they were a piece worth millions.