“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.

She’s in there, I remember thinking, a wave of anticipation dousing my heart. But despite my anxiety, I felt grounded and eager. I believed I was where I was supposed to be. And I kept reminding myself of something Cal had said in Montana: I’d already lost what I was afraid of losing. There was nothing at stake here.

Not surprisingly, the structure was a work of art too. A 10 x 10 roofless form made of asymmetrical bronze frames, edging thick pieces of glass with just the slightest tint, as if the glassmaker had blown a thin stream of rose-colored smoke into them before they set. There was an open doorframe at the front of the glass house and one on the opposite side in the back. Each had a security guard standing by.

But the most visually compelling feature of the structure was the glass itself. All the panes looked like someone had taken a chisel to them, causing artfully crafted cracks to extend out from random points. I could barely see beyond the fractures, but even through the landscape of a thousand jagged lines, I recognized the figure of the woman seated at the table inside.

At exactly 10:00 a.m. the first person in line, a young African-American girl wearing a lot of colorful necklaces and a big backpack, was ushered up to the glass house and invited to enter.