The silence makes my skin crawl, but I can't stop watching her move between paintings.Twenty-one fucking years alive and I've never felt anything hit me in the gut like Nora when she's locked onto something beautiful.
We move from room to room inside the gallery.
Her fingers hover near a canvas, not touching, but I know she wants to.I see it in the way her hand shakes slightly, this physical ache to connect.
She transforms when she's like this.
What's that like?
To just let beauty consume you like that without reason?
To not fight it, to completely give in to it?
I drift after her like some ghost tied to her ankle.
"Look at this one."Her voice is a hook in my chest, yanking me to her.
I stand close enough to feel her warmth but not touch.She points at some red-gold canvas, a dancer spinning with her skirt exploding around her.
"Look at the way the artist captured movement," she whispers."It's like you can hear the music if you look long enough."
I nod but I'm not seeing the dancer.
I'm counting the faint freckles on her cheek while watching her pulse hammer in her throat.
My own private gallery piece.
More complicated than any of this fancy art on the walls.These artists spent their lives trying to bottle feelings into images and fuck, I get it now.That desperate need to grab something so perfect it actually hurts to look at.
She's fucking beautiful but it's not even about that, it's how she sees beautiful things, it's how she comes alive near them, how she just lets herself feel shit.
It's how she can just appreciate something outside herself while I'm drowning in my own head, my own bullshit, my own?—
"What do you think?"she asks, turning suddenly toward me.
What do I think?
I think watching someone love something is the best high you could ever feel and if I could steal the light in her eyes right now, I'd never need another fix again.
"Incredible," I say, and we both know damn well I'm not talking about the painting.
We go deeper into the gallery where the light gets colder, silvery.Abstract pieces hang like rips in reality.The ceiling curves up into this dome covered in tiny mirrors, throwing our reflections back in broken pieces.
Our private universe of fractured selves.
There's this glass sculpture in the center that's life-sized, a person breaking out of what looks like frozen water.
It's freakishly good.
You can see muscles straining in glass, this violent birth happening in slow motion for eternity.
She circles it.
I circle her.
And like everything between us, it becomes a dance.
The Spanish have a word—duende—for the mysterious power of art to move us.
