Personal Essay
The first time I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was in June 2025. I left my student housing on 34th and 8th and navigated my way uptown. From the Museum of Natural History station through Central Park, my eyes flickered between the GPS on my phone and the crowd of strollers and held hands walking through the Upper East Side for the Annual Museum Mile Festival. Though I had never considered myself an art connoisseur, that day, between the scatter of tourists and displays, my favorite art piece found me.
I had arrived in New York City two weeks before. I was living there for the summer to work an internship at a fashion PR agency. The summer came, following my first semester at the University of Miami. I had started college that spring, and subsequently, my life had become very busy. During my gap semester, no one had ventured to warn me that going from the slow pace of Syracuse, New York, to the adult playground that is Miami would be a transition that would throw me into the depths of superficiality, hold a gun to my self-control, and run off with any faith I had in the kindness of strangers.
Miami is a fast city. On the days when you’re allowed to slow it down, living in Miami feels like living inside a vivid dream. For me, nothing at college felt fully realized. But by the time I landed in Syracuse, Miami had truly remolded me. I returned home not myself, but also not who I was in college. The person I had come back as existed between fantasy and ambition, built on a knowing that Syracuse was not the place for me, and a gut feeling that my life in Miami had been narrowly crafted.
For Spring break, I returned to Syracuse, a city dressed in dead grass and covered by gray skies. Between winter blizzards and summer heat, Syracuse in March has a silence that allows the extreme to breathe. I sat in my childhood bedroom and could envision my summer there, sweating behind an espresso bar, rushing to fill coffee cups for a line of hippies. I closed my eyes and prayed, “God, please do not make me spend my summer here.” And then I applied to 29 summer internships in New York City.
My mother parked on 33rd Street to unload the car. I was staying in the student housing, in the New Yorker Hotel, which is tucked between the 15th and 18th floors. After five trips of dragging belongings up the service elevator, I hugged my mother goodbye.
On my first night, I lay restless in my new room. The adrenaline of moving had died, and from the window, the city that never sleeps expanded in my eyes. For the first time, from applying to the internship, to booking my housing, to moving, it dawned on me that I was all alone. I thought about all the people I knew who lived in New York City, my uncle and aunt in Brooklyn, and my cousins in Brooklyn…Why was my entire network in Brooklyn? And related to me?
I fell asleep facing the only non-familial connection I had, my roommate, a computer science student from Harvard who routinely left his lube next to my face wash. Our kinship would fade after I caught on to his habit of spending two hours in the bathroom every time he stepped into it.
But thus, the next day I woke up, ripped the tag off my new black polo, and walked 7 blocks to my first day at the office.
My first impression of working in New York came through my supervisor. She was a New York native, which I honestly respected, until she began to remind everyone at least once a day. She held personal aversions to influencers, gentrifiers, and matcha. During a rant about gentrification, she once claimed that “Migrating to New York is okay, but only for creative people, like how it used to be.” I guess her taste for people had no impact on her taste for interns, as our table was full of unpaid, private-school, transplant, matcha-addicts that she had hand-picked.
By the end of my 30-minute onboarding, I had learned that she also hated talking at the intern table and that the 40-minute lunchtime was meant to be very seriously respected.
I spent my first day working in silence, organizing Google Sheet tabs of influencers’ names and follower counts. None of the interns talked. Our supervisor would send each of us our tasks in a Google group chat. Seconds after each message, feet would be shuffling, keyboards typing, or boxes torn apart. These interns were clearly passionate and efficient, most of them using this internship to support their fashion education at Parsons or FIT. Around 1:00 pm, we each periodically took our 45-minute lunch. I wandered through Chelsea with a 45-minute timer on my phone.
At the end of the day, the other interns and I got into the elevator to leave, twiddling our thumbs in silence all the way down to the first floor.
I only worked on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This meant that I had four days of my week to do whatever I wanted. For the first few weeks, I was just wandering. Going to Soho, the West Village, East Harlem, Williamsburg, I guess anywhere the train could take me. I had gotten a $2,500 scholarship from my university to go toward my expenses. When I calculated my food budget until August, it came out to around 15 dollars a day. But when I factored in the train rides, it was more like $11 a day. So, on my days off, I waited until 3:00 pm to eat and bought a cheap pizza and a 7-Eleven drink. After that, I took the train wherever I wanted to go.
By my third free day, walking with no direction just felt like feet moving. The romance of being young and unbridled in New York City had eroded, and somewhere along the way, the city had morphed into endless rows of advertisements and storefronts. To add to the experience was a constant summer heat that cooked stains underneath all my t-shirts. I walked down Canal Street with a burrito in my hand, looking for a place to sit. Past the playground and the mahjong games, I ended up on a bench in the back of Columbus Park, balancing the burrito on my lap. I tried not to let it slip as I squeezed hand sanitizer out of my pocket. I put my head down to eat and, in one bite, tore the tortilla, spilling beans, rice, and chicken into splattered stains on my light-wash jeans. Yikes. My head shot up at the man in front of me to see if he had any acknowledgement for the burrito bleeding out onto me. We locked eyes for a second, then he shifted his focus back on his ruan and started to strum it. I looked away, embarrassed, as I puddled the stray burrito filling back into the plastic bag it came in. This went on for a while, the music of the Ruan outpacing everything around me.
On the day I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I hadn’t eaten all day. My hunger had grown into the kind that began to feel more like nausea. When I arrived at the museum, I turned the corner to see a line stretching from the museum entrance to the end of the block. I sighed. Maybe the walk from the train station through Central Park was enough adventure for the day? But I got in line, standing behind groups of relatives, couples, and friends. I shuffled towards the door with a heightened sense of the force drawing me into the museum. It was the kind of force that finds you when nothing else has; it pushes you towards something and opens your hands to anything.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is like a huge maze. I had done no prior research on it; I just knew that it was something I had to see while I was in New York. That day, the halls of the museum were filled with people in every corner. I followed the pace of the crowd, each room quickly blending into the next.
I walked through the museum with half an eye on the priceless works and half an eye on the crowd. Being alone has always given me this kind of anxiety, the overwrought kind. It makes me overthink every tiny action. I slipped between couples, families, and exhibits, trying to take it all in. But still not sure what “taking it in” even looked like.
I passed the wing of ancient Egyptian art and then Catholic art, accidentally making a loop around to where I began. My direction became even more aimless than my initial wandering. I looked down at the map they gave me at the entrance. Where am I? I thought. I looked at the wall, trying to decipher if the art was African, Greek, or medieval, because that made a large difference as to where I was on the map.
I saw an open-air room and an array of stone sculptures. Ugh! This was my third circle around the first floor. Initially, I rushed past this room trying to find the American Art room. To the right of the entrance, I spotted a little hallway that annexed the room of sculptures from the wall. Pushed up against the wall, there was a bench. That hallway had to have been the only empty part of the entire museum. Finally, a place to sit. I sat down on the bench and closed my eyes. My dried-out eyeballs burned against my eyelids.
After a few minutes, I was ready to give the museum another spin. I lifted my head, and on the wall in front of me hung a tapestry. It carried a saturation that made it look more painted than woven. The fabric had an amber tone that made the scene it depicted appear like a flashback. In the middle of the tapestry, a couple sat on a throne mid-embrace, in the bottom right, a child ate grapes from his hands, and in the background, a group stomped grapes into wine. The characters looked cherubic, like little angels caught in motion. They were mid-bite, mid-throw, and mid-embrace. Their eyelines drew you in and then guided you around their world. The scene looked like a slow blink from the eyes of a silent observer. I wandered from the focus of one character to another, feeling like another silent observer of the world, almost growing protective over its preciousness.
I stood up to read the inscription on the piece.
“This tapestry was part of a set of twelve celebrating courtly pastimes, each dedicated to a month of the year. Here, the ripened fruits and vintage traditionally associated with autumn are evoked by a lady and gentleman sampling wine and a boy feasting on grapes. In the middle ground, a pair of lovers meet under a simple trellised arbor, beautified by abundant trusses of ripe fruit. Behind them, vintners press grapes and barrel wine, while in the distance, dancing peasants celebrate the end of the harvest. April, from the same series, is on display nearby.
Though woven in eighteenth-century Paris, these hangings were designed after a sixteenth-century Netherlandish tapestry set (now lost) in the French royal collection. The resulting works winningly combine a Renaissance sensibility in subject matter, compositional style, and clothing fashions with a lush Rococo border, a rainbow palette, and virtuosi weaving techniques more typical of 1730s France.”
The tapestry is an ode to October; that is evident through the name, October, from the Months of Lucas. Woven into the fruit on the trees, the cloth that drapes the characters, and the shade of the clouded sky is someone’s memory of many Octobers. I could see that in the characters, through their negligence of the audience, they were busy enjoying the dream of an October far away. Despite my differences in time and experience from the origins of this piece, I felt right there with them, caught by nostalgia. Even a little paralyzed by it.
Initially, the painting struck me as an illustration of the past. But is to dream of the past not innately, also a call for the future? I see art like this as prayer, one that calls for seasons to return as sweet as recollection. One weaver’s silent offering to the cyclicity of time.
I think that to draw from memory is to give breath to an unlived version of the past. For this reason, I see nostalgia as not just a reiteration of the past, but more so a stencil for the future. It’s a dreamer’s attempt at reconstruction.
To be honest, I know nothing about art, weaving, or French tapestries. But when art speaks to you, technique becomes an unimportant matter. My focus blurred as I stared into the tapestry; I felt my concentration burn a hole in my consciousness, leading to the autumns of my own life. Golden afternoon suns, pumpkin patches, Halloween, and the city I grew up in, covered in orange. I saw this like a tapestry in my mind. It reminded me that the past directs my path. That we are driven by a desire not to let the good seasons fizzle out. That we polish our gold to convince ourselves that it is not fading.
For that, my tapestry is also my map. A map of feelings that unfolds at my most misguided time to remind me that every heartbreak has a homecoming of love and that every wound calls forth new skin.
I cried in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I sat with my back against the wall, and my nose lifted to the tapestry. I cried for the first time in months, for what seemed like no reason, for nobody to hear. It was a moment where all I could feel was my chest. Feel it drop, shake for air, and fill between the hard and stuttered breaths. And, I can’t say that it was sadness that led me to that point, but more so the works of joy. It was the best cry I’ve ever had, in front of the most beautiful piece of art I had ever seen.
Eventually, I found my people in New York City. On one of my last days of the summer, I looked down at the city from the top floor of one of my new friend’s apartments. You see the streets differently when you are not sweating in them. I’ve walked avenues and streets dragging 40 pounds of clothes, sweated in underground stations, choked on humidity, and fallen face-first into puddles on the curb. I had not realized that my only responsibility was to submit my anxiety to time and watch it interlace my life in New York City Day by day.
From a rooftop, the world looks more like a tapestry. I can see it no matter where I am when I close my eyes. Under a Miami sunset, or a Syracuse blizzard, that time of my life has conjured a tapestry woven with strands of work, love, and friendship. One built on the canvas of a lonely boy and backdropped by the best city in the world. If I have one tool to manage the drag of time, it’s the tapestry that I see when I close my eyes. It reminds me that the beauty of the past is already on its way back to me.
I stopped at the Mister Softee truck parked outside the museum, on my way home. I ordered the pineapple ice cream in a waffle cone for the first time. It became my favorite. I walked through Central Park back to the train station, with ice cream dripping down my arm, and too tired to find a napkin. Behind me, in tiny drops, lay a trail of vanilla ice cream uptown from the museum back to my bedroom.