Hello. I be follow your career since I was small girl. Before I learn your work I am very sad like wanting to die. I think about to end me. My life is much tediousness in China. Less of art. Then I see I can make my sad beautiful. I can make my everything beautiful. Thank you for teach me this. I am Yanmei Liu from Beijing.

“You understand?” Yanmei asked me. “To make sad beautiful?”

I nodded and told her October had taught me the same thing.

The guy behind me was a ridiculously tall, bristly art student from a college in the city. His name was Jessie; he was wearing eyeliner, reeked of body odor, and talked about himself without pause. I pegged him as puerile, and most likely on some bad drugs, but listening to him yammer about his life distracted me, so I let him go. When Jessie finally asked me a question—namely, why I was there—it caught me off guard and I answered him with a shrug toward the sidewalk. After that he seemed to suss out some weakness in me; he made almost pathological eye contact as he gave me an unsolicited account of what drew him to Sorrow, explaining that he had a thing for older women due to the lasting impact of his first girlfriend, a sadistic, forty-two-year-old socialite whose name was also Jesse. “But without the ‘i’,” he clarified.

This was Jessie’s second time visiting Sorrow. He’d been there the day before and admitted that the reason he came back was because holding October’s hands and staring into her eyes had turned him on. As soon as his time was up, he planned on going to the restroom to jack off, just like he’d done the previous afternoon.

“Dude I described my cock to her in great detail yesterday no kidding I told her how I’d use it on her too if she’d let me I’m pretty sure she was as turned on as I was.”

I was pretty sure she wasn’t, and I almost got into it with Jessie, but I yawned and he didn’t yawn back, and according to an article I’d recently read, that meant he was a psychopath, so I refrained from starting any kind of heated exchange with him.

I told Jessie I needed to center myself before I went in to the museum, and I turned around, put in my earbuds, and listened to a playlist October had made me back when we first started hanging out.

In 2013 SFMoMA had closed for an extensive renovation. It reopened three years later with three times more exhibit space, including the ground-floor galleries now accessible via the new entrance at Schwab Hall, allowing visitors into the adjacent Roberts Family Gallery without having to go through the main lobby.

At 9:56 a guard unlocked the double doors, while the mechanical shades rose at a laboriously slow speed and disappeared into the ceiling. One at a time, the people at the front of the line advanced through a metal detector and into the building. I advanced halfway to the entrance, and from there I could see bronze stanchions with blush-colored ropes demarcating the queue that snaked toward the structure in the middle of the room.