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:

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.