I always thought it was called Cache-Cache. But today the plaque clearly read Hide and Seek.
In the old museum, then just the museum, this painting hung in a small gallery off the beaten track. A old bench faced it and that's where, when things at home got too searing, I'd go and hide.
Admission must not have been too much, otherwise how could a 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 year old girl afford to visit such a painting so frequently?
I would find that painting and bench and then sit there and wait. Wait for myself to disappear into the big painting so I could explore each and every one of the millions of little paintings filling every inch of the canvas. I saw my beginning and my ending and in between, I looked for hope in rich colors and secret shapes.
That's not possible now.
The new museum is very fancy, it costs a bunch to get in (unless you have friends in high places) and there are now many escalators and bathrooms and glass balconies that make all the winding galleries flow into one another so that everyone can easily swim upstream to see something else amazing they've only seen in postcards or something completely incomprehensible, whereupon nothing stops them from make loud fun of it before they swim off to another vaulting hall.
This painting isn't in any of those galleries. It hangs in one of the waiting area outside one of the many bathrooms at the top of one of the numerous escalators.
Like a mural on a subway station wall, it is there to make the passage pretty and when it does get noticed, it's captured into a small screen that could never, ever reveal all its mysteries and the nooks and corners I carefully tucked myself into.
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