The Sinner's Saint

Day off 2/3

☾
I am fashionably late and only partially on purpose.
Traffic gets half the blame. The other half goes to the fact that whoever fucking mailed me this dress did not mail me anything to go with it.

I spent twenty minutes holding up jewellery and eye shadow to green sequins in different lighting like I was solving something and I was solving something and it required hella concentration.

The dress though... Sheeesh.
Its floor length, deep green sequin gown, the kind that shifts when I move, catches gold in certain light, almost emerald in others like it can't decide what it wants to be and is gorgeous because of it.

It literally does all the work without asking much from me. I did my own makeup because I enjoy it and I'm good at it and sometimes you just want to do the thing yourself. I put on some gold jewellery to bring it together.

My manager texts at seven to confirm the car. I grab my clutch, check the mirror one last time and leave.

The car outside is a black Bentley which I was not expecting on a Tuesday night. The driver holds the door without being asked which I appreciate deeply and personally. I get in, put my bag beside me, and exhale for what feels like the first time since this morning.

The city does what it does at night, golden and sprawling and completely unbothered. I put my earphones in, low, and let my brain decompress for twenty minutes because it has genuinely been a day, the whole William thing, the podcast, the cereal discourse and it's not even done yet.

The driver pulls up to the venue and I notice the crowd immediately.

Photographers, people arranged beautifully in outfits that cost as much as small vehicles, a step and repeat, the whole thing already in motion. I check my reflection in her phone camera once and get out when I'm positive, I'm ready.

The sequins catch the venue lighting immediately and shift gold and I think okay the dress knew what it was doing all along and people agree since I got all eyes on me. Vindicated. Ouu big word, don't ask me to spell it.

---
Inside makes sense the moment I'm in it.

It's a group exhibition with eight artists, fashion and visual art colliding in the way that works perfectly. Some garments look suspended like sculpture, paintings that reference fabric and texture and the body, the whole space is dim and deliberate with lighting that makes everything feel like it was meant to be looked at slowly and specifically.

She takes her time.

People always seem surprised by this. I'm not here to be seen and leave, I'm not doing laps for cameras, I stop in front of things and I stay there until I've actually looked and my manager has called this inefficient to my face on multiple occasions even though she/he thinks straightening my hair and curling it is efficient. Anyway, I call it the whole point.

I'm standing in front of a large canvas. A black woman mid motion, painted in a way that catches the light differently depending on where you stand, and I have been standing in three different spots trying to figure out how when someone stops beside me.

Neither of us looks over immediately.

"It moves," the woman says after a moment.

"Yeah," I say. "I've been here a while trying to figure out how and why." I look over then. She's maybe mid forties, long black locs, a dress that costs more than most people's rent, the kind of quiet confidence that comes from qualifying for every room and stopping needing to prove it a long time ago.

"She mixed sand into the paint in certain sections," she says. "The texture catches the light as it shifts. It's different every hour." I look back at the painting.