There’s a building near the Pier 11 ferry stop in lower Manhattan that I’ve been watching go up slowly over the past year. Every time I cross the river to Brooklyn, I climb up to the top deck of the ferry and snap a photo. I have a whole folder full of these images on my phone.
It’s not an especially interesting building architecturally. What I’m obsessed with is the wild color story that’s been evolving inside it as it gets closer to completion.
There’s something optical illusion-y about how the protective orange mesh over what will eventually be floor-to-ceiling windows runs visual interference with the various pastel shades of sheetrock on the inside walls that gives the shimmering illusion that the whole building is made of glowing blocks of color. Yellow sheetrock turns marigold and fiery sunset tangerine. Powder blue sheetrock, depending on how many layers of orange mesh hang over it, becomes rose or magenta or maroon, with occasional streaks of sharp, almost fluorescent violet.
The effect has basically transformed this random construction site into a precise simulacrum of the inside of my brain. It’s just extremely my shit. The vivid-hued spaces between the floors are the same horizontal bands of color I see when I close my eyes to meditate. The layering of translucent fluorescence over expanses of chalky pastels produces the same abstract landscapes I’ve been painting in old books as a daily practice for the past five years. And in the portrait series I’m currently working on, the figures’ bodies are collaged from photos of skyscrapers transformed into colorful garments—in the same exact tones as the colors on the inside of this half-finished building. When I let myself run with the reverie, it feels like the city has somehow tapped directly into my subconscious mind, mapping my dreamscapes onto itself in real life.
Can I tell you what this has been doing to my nervous system? The irrational jolts of pleasure I’ve been feeling over this past year each time I lumber up to the top deck, feel the swell of the river under me, breathe in lungfuls of cold briny air, drag my eyes up out of my to-do list and let them sink into these iridescent colors? The world is a broken mess, yes. But give me a regular dose of magenta, electric lilac and orange mesh rippling in the wind across the surface of a half-finished building like a psychedelic wheat field and here’s me pulling my ragged heart up out of the wreckage every single time. Here’s me summoning: we got this. Here’s me proclaiming: beauty abounds. Here’s me promising: I will keep going.
Anyway. A few days ago I went for a run in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I was all the way across the river from the building, but I still instinctively stopped to snap a picture of the Manhattan skyline. I zoomed in—and then discovered to my profoundest sadness that over the last few days construction had progressed way faster than usual.
There are no more colors now. No more undulating mesh. My beloved building is almost entirely encased in glass. Its industrious workers have done their jobs well, unwittingly yanking a sacred pilgrimage site out of my feverish imagination and delivering it efficiently back to the boring-ass world of whatever.
I’m not saying I cried, sitting there by myself at the river’s edge with that zoomed-in photo glowing on the phone in my hand. But I’m not saying I didn’t.
What I will say is that I felt bereft. Like a friend had died. Or an imaginary friend, which might be—well, definitely not worse, but maybe lonelier. Harder to explain.
How do you find solace when you lose something that never fully existed to begin with? Some uncategorizable thing that you saw and loved and came to rely on with a hyper-specificity that defies logic and is now gone and will never come back? A thing that maybe a handful of other people—strangers, but somehow your kin—also saw and loved and are now grieving, too?
Now that it’s gone, this ineffable thing, how will you find those other people who loved it, and who therefore without realizing it also loved you?
How will you tell them that you loved them back?
That you love them still?
I don’t know. I put my phone back in my jacket pocket and ran again for a while in the raw drizzle and felt dislocated and sad.
And then I went to the studio and I made a thing.
To be honest, the thing I made doesn’t come close to capturing the original thing or the feeling of loving or losing that thing.
And I’m sorry to report that the failed attempt at capturing the thing has actually magnified the ache of losing it instead of bringing any relief. I’m not sure what to do about that.
But.
A new thing exists in the world that didn’t before. And I do, if I’m being honest, kind of love the new thing.
I will probably try again to capture the beloved lost thing, and many other beloved lost things, and I will probably fail again and again, each time in new ways.
I will ache and probably keep aching. But as a result, other new things will be here.
And maybe I will love them. And maybe you will too.
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Read more Field Notes On Longing here://www.katequarfordt.com/blog.