Being obsolete to most.

Every afternoon, I walk down Santa Monica Boulevard to my gym, keeping to the side where the traffic moves against me, where I can feel its force, the pressure of the city pushing forward as I move through it. There is a shop at the corner of a side street, a shop that should not exist, that exists anyway. It makes custom frames. Only frames. It does not bend to convenience or necessity, does not justify itself with multiple functions. It is what it is, and that is enough. I don’t know how it survives here, how it holds its ground in a city that erases whatever does not immediately justify its rent.

But of course, this is West Hollywood. It will have a framing shop. That is not in question.

Inside, everything is arranged in straight lines, sharp edges, an order that borders on defiance. Frame samples march along the walls, the aisles disciplined in their precision. The colors are pale, metallic, deliberate. No hesitation. No apology. No black.

‍

For over a year, the window held a painting. Six feet by six feet, a grid of color forming the image of a street lined with palm trees. It was a structure more than a picture, something that held itself together as much as it depicted anything at all. I passed it every day, and every day I told myself that if I had a wall big enough, I would take it home. But I didn’t. And so I didn’t.

‍

‍

I am being punished for looking at it.

It is not meant to be seen, not in the way paintings are supposed to be seen, not in the way color and form are meant to guide the eye, to hold attention, to resolve into something that can be named. It does not offer that. It refuses. It sits behind the glass like a thing that has already made up its mind about me, about anyone who stops, about the uselessness of stopping at all.

The circles are not circles. They are wounds, or stones, or something pulled up from the ocean floor, calcified by pressure and time. They stack against one another, press outward, silent and watching. I am watching them back, but I do not feel like I am the one looking. I feel like I am the one being looked at. Not studied, not considered, just observed. Like something caught in its field of vision. Like something irrelevant to it.

I do not know if I am meant to feel this way or if I have simply imposed my own guilt onto it. It does not matter. The painting does not care. It does not shift under the weight of interpretation. It does not react to my presence. It does not acknowledge my attempts to make sense of it.

And still, I do not leave. I stand there, looking, knowing that I am not supposed to. Knowing that I will find no answer here. Knowing that it will not give me anything back.

That is the punishment.

‍

Then one day, it was gone. For weeks, the window sat empty, the frame waiting, expectant, unburdened. Today, when I passed, there was something new. A black canvas. No divisions, no architecture, nothing that held the world in place. Only motion. Dark forms pressing outward, edges dissolving, the suggestion of something forming and unforming at once. It had been placed there with intention. Someone had chosen this as the thing to face the street, the thing people would see as they walked past. It was a statement, though I didn’t know what it was saying.

For the first time, I stopped. The store was closed. I stood in front of it anyway.

I was not thinking of the person who placed it there. I was thinking of the people who had seen the painting before this one, the ones who had watched it for months, who had thought of it and then, one day, noticed it was missing. Who else had seen it and understood that something had been taken from them, however small? Who had kept walking, and who had stopped?

I will never know.

But if you are reading this, you can stand here too.