"The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love."

-Alain de Botton

In September, I begin to buy items of both religious and pastoral reconnaissance. In a New Mexican marketplace on a hot, dusty afternoon, I dig a wooden bracelet bearing paintings of Guadalupe from a tangled web of roughly hewn jewelry. Around the corner in a small boutique, I add a beautiful cross of hammered tin to my growing collection, and feel touched by a set of Milagros meant to help heal wounded limbs.

In Santa Barbara, I continue my quest for irrelevant beauty. My hands sift through a bowl of ludicrous rings, electing a dome shaped knuckle-duster bearing the image of a Mexican peasant couple locked in a swooning embrace. I pick through spinning displays of postcards, selecting vintage looking photographs of coastal sunsets and maps of wine country. My final selection is a necklace made from twisted thread and glass beads whose cloudy stillness remind me of the moon when clouds pass over it.

I like to pretend that these items aren’t completely meaningless and that they will be the conversation piece that gains me human interaction. Logically, I understand that I would be very nervous about anyone who strolled up to me and announced that my beaded necklace reminds them of their stargazing childhood, but my loneliness hopes that someone will at least pocket that thought and in turn, become curious about me.

I was unprepared for my trip to the museum. Something about the oil strokes of Edvard Munch’s “The Kiss (On The Shore),” still slick after nearly one hundred years, triggers a tender reaction within me. Dizzyingly recorded was the image of a couple smeared together as one; the sunset as a mere afterthought. The accompanying placard, a quote from Sigbjorn Obstfelder, went something like this:

“Through the microscope, under X-Rays, everywhere I see a plexus, a design… Do you see the temple reaching out over all space, the tabernacle of the universe? Just look at those long straight threads linking member to member, those most visible to the human eye… When they embrace and couple, seize hold of each other, fusing two into one or two forming thousands… Everything out there is within me. My soul, my body emerged from the volcanic eruption of the worlds.”

Perhaps it is my art student’s knowledge of Munch’s lonely existence that causes me to view this scene as sentimental. It’s also possible that I have completely overridden the artist’s intent in order to inject my own, but regardless, I was left feeling rather lucid and painful in that moment. The Kiss is the most sublime representation of where humanity’s existential values lie; in intimacy, connections, love… and I, with my latent love, distant friends, and concerned family, feel the gaping hole of it’s absence. Standing in front of that painting felt supremely authentic, and in the words of a friend, I remembered I was young.