I drove to SFMoMA on Sunday, October 21, and arrived fifteen minutes before the museum opened. By the time I turned onto Third Street, I could see the line for Sorrow. It started at the Howard Street entrance, rounded the corner, ran the length of the building, and ended at the intersection of Third and Minna.

The popularity of the exhibit was something I hadn’t considered, and after doing some quick math in my head, I didn’t bother to park. October sat from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and each visitor was allowed up to five minutes with her. She was seeing, on average, twelve people an hour. That’s only eighty-four per day, and there were well over a hundred already in line. With only three performances left, I was going to have to get there a lot earlier the following day, or my chances of getting in would be nil.

Monday morning, I crossed the Golden Gate well before the sun started to crack thin interstices of flame-colored light into the sky over the East Bay. When I got to SFMoMA, I counted fifty-six people already in line. At number fifty-seven, I felt confident I would see October before the day ended.

The front-facing walls of the Roberts Family Gallery where Sorrow was being held are all glass, on the ground floor of the museum, and visible from the street. Huge shades, white but opaque, descended from the interior ceiling, preventing anyone from seeing the exhibit until it opened. Outside, the word “SORROW” was written across the shades in a font I recognized as October’s handwriting. Even that small hint of her presence packed a punch, and I braced myself for the day.

In line, I picked up on a sense of camaraderie among the people there, as if we were all connected to one another by the mere fact that we’d shown up and would, for hours, be taking small steps forward together. This was something else I hadn’t considered: the lengths to which October’s fans would go to see her.

Number fifty-five in line was Eli Murray, a British journalist covering Sorrow for the Times. A few years older than I, Eli lived in San Francisco’s Mission District. He hadn’t missed a day of the exhibit, and when I asked him why he kept coming back, he said, “Stare into an empath’s eyes for five minutes, you’re going to learn something about yourself every time. You’ll see.”

The young girl directly in front of me had come all the way from Beijing to experience Sorrow. She was nineteen and dreamed of being a performance artist herself. In her hand she held a piece of paper on which she’d written what she planned to say to October. She asked me if I would read it and let her know if it sounded all right. I found the note so touching, I asked her for permission to take a picture of it with my phone. She said I could, and this is what it said: