A NIGHT AT LONDON's V&A MUSEUM
Somewhere in London, a woman's relationship recently came to a sad end. She had plans to go to an event at the Victoria and Albert Museum tonight, which is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things because she and her boyfriend just split up and she is left staring at a mountain of blank space.
But the tickets for the museum had been bought in advance, so her friend Josh decides to go alone. However, he would hate to see that spare ticket go to waste, so he asks people on the bus if they want to join him. Everyone declines.
Josh arrives at the museum. He is late, and the event is about to begin. The lady at the service desk gives him wrong directions to the lecture hall, so he is left searching for it on his own.
And it is just as he is sprinting frantically through the main hall to get to the staircase at the opposite end that he rushes straight up to me and hands me a piece of paper:
- I have an extra ticket, do you want to go? It's for this talk upstairs...! Me: Oh! Well... - SURE, why not?!
So I start running up the stairs with him to who knows what floor, help find free seats in the back of a packed lecture hall among rows "RESERVED FOR LATECOMERS", and join him in blatantly staring at an older man who shows up at the last minute and who is supposedly world-famous within his field (my staring mostly because I am completely oblivious to who this guy is).
And so, for an hour and a half, I find myself listening to a lecture about:
The Japanese Garden.
Holy shit.
I will never look at gravel the same way again.
What I learned is that relationships may come and go like cherry blossoms. But moss remains.
Thank you for the ticket, single lady.
You'll be alright.