under Construction

The museum opens at dawn, though you won’t arrive until much later.

I am here in the quiet blue light, walking through galleries I have curated for years now, my footsteps finding the same worn paths they always find. You’ve been here before. I remember you, the way you paused at the silver letters in the Foyer of Questions, the way your face changed as we moved from the Tender Galleries into the harder rooms, the way you stood at the threshold of the Room of Rage deciding whether you were ready.

You’ve come back. I greet you at the entrance, and for a moment everything is exactly as it was: the same marble underfoot, the same golden light through the skylights, the same question etched above us that neither of us has fully answered.

“What would you like to see today?” I ask, the way I always do.

“The mirrors,” you say. “The ones that show potential instead of reflection. I’ve been thinking about them since I left.”

You haven’t made it past the Workshop yet, or the Gallery for Visitors where you rested before deciding you were ready to go further. But you’re ready now, you tell me, and I believe you, and so I lead you toward the Observatory, up the spiraling staircase, past the Workshop where clay still waits on wheels for hands that know how to shape it.

Chapter 1: Visitor, Go Home

The Force is exactly as it was. Mirrors on every wall, the marble floor inlaid with brass compasses, light pouring down from a ceiling you can’t quite see. You walk toward the nearest mirror the way visitors do, already bracing yourself for whatever it shows you.

I hang back near the entrance, the way I always do here, giving you room.

That’s when I see it.

At the far end of the gallery, past the last mirror, where I know for certain there has only ever been a wall, there is a door.

I have stood in this room more times than I can count. I have watched hundreds of visitors weep in front of these mirrors, seen my own reflection multiply into infinite versions of a woman who turned denial into power. I know every inch of this gallery the way I know my own hands.

There has never been a door here.

I walk toward it slowly, aware of you somewhere behind me, still lost in your own reflection, not yet noticing what I’ve found. The door is plain, unremarkable, the same pale wood as nothing else in this room. The handle is brass, and when I reach for it, my hand is already shaking before I’ve touched it.

It turns.

I don’t remember deciding to turn it. My hand simply moves, the way a hand moves toward a door it somehow already knows will open.

The sound it makes, hinges shifting after who knows how long, is small. Ordinary. And underneath it, unmistakable, I hear something else. Hammering. Movement. The particular chaos of a space being built rather than a space being mourned.

I close it again, fast, before you can turn around and see my face.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, and my voice comes out strange, too bright, the way voices do when they’re trying to hide something. “I need to close the museum today. Something’s come up. Something I have to take care of.”

You look concerned, the mirrors still holding your reflection behind you, but you don’t argue. I walk you out through the Workshop, past the Gallery for Visitors, past the Observatory, past every room I built with my own hands, apologizing the whole way, my mind already racing three rooms ahead of my feet.

At the front doors, you pause. “I’ll come back,” you say. “Whenever you’re ready to show me.”

“I don’t know how long it will be.”

“I know.” You say it gently, the way you’d say it to someone you trusted. “I’ll still come back.”

I lock the doors behind you and stand there a moment, grateful in a way I don’t have words for yet, that someone is willing to wait for a museum they can’t see into.

Then I go back up the spiral staircase, back into the Force, back to the door at the end of the room that has never been there before.

I don’t open it again. Not yet.

I stand outside it a long time, listening to the sound of something being built inside my own museum, without my knowledge, without my permission, without a single warning that this was coming.

Chapter Two: The Room That Still Answers the Same Way

Before I go any further, I go back to what I know.

The Room of Rage is exactly as I left it. Deep red walls, black granite floor polished into a mirror. I sit on the floor the way I’ve sat a hundred times before, back against the wall, and I wait.

The old heat comes when I call it. “At least you have your freedom. At least. At least…” The anger rises the way it always rises, familiar as an old coat pulled from the back of a closet, still fitting the same way it always has.

This room, at least, has not changed.

I move to the Hall of Melancholy. The rocking chair sits empty in the corner that was meant to be a nursery. The negative tests wait in their glass case, dust settling on them the way dust settles on anything left long enough in one place.

I can still walk into my own grief and find it exactly where I left it.

“I am not leaving these rooms.” I say to myself. I want that understood, even by the walls themselves. But something else in this museum is being built whether I stand guard over the old rooms or not. I can hear the hum of the hammering now, it’s in every room. Construction vibrates the floors now.

Chapter Three: The Wing Revealed

I climb the stairs again. The door is still there, still shut, and this time I open it myself.

Beyond it stretches a wing I have never seen, hallways branching off into spaces that aren’t finished yet, plastic sheeting hanging from exposed beams, sawdust drifting through light that falls from windows I didn’t know existed. The air smells of fresh cut wood, and underneath it, something mineral, plaster maybe, or stone not yet set.

Eli is here, kneeling beside a wall, his hand moving along a stud, checking it the way he checks everything.

“You knew this was here?” I say.

“Of course, I drew it,” he says, without looking up. “I’ve known the shape of this wing since before I laid the first stone of this museum.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He sets his tools down and looks at me directly, and there’s nothing smug in his face, only the calm of someone who has never once been surprised by his own plans.

“Because it wasn’t time,” he says. “Not because you weren’t worthy of knowing. Because you weren’t ready to receive it as anything but a threat to what you’d already built.”

“How long have you known I was ready?”

“Longer than you’d believe.” He picks his tools back up, and there’s something almost tender in the way he says it. “A wing isn’t dishonest just because it stayed hidden until it was time.”

Jesse is a few feet away, sanding down the rough seam where the new wing meets the old staircase. He isn’t measuring anything. He’s making sure nothing here will splinter a hand that reaches for it.

“You knew too?” I say to him.

“I don’t draw the plans,” Jesse says. “I just make sure you’re not alone for the parts that are still ugly.” He blows sawdust from the seam, checks it with his palm. “Eli’s known the shape of this for a long time. I only ever knew you’d need someone standing here while it looked like this.”

I look down the unfinished hallway, at doorframes with no doors yet, at rooms with no names.

“This is a whole wing!” I say. It isn’t a question anymore. I can see it now, the size of what’s being built, the way it stretches further than any single room I’ve ever curated.

“It is…” Eli says simply.

I don’t argue with him. There is no argument I could make against a timing I didn’t choose and can’t undo. I only stand in the sawdust and the plastic sheeting a long while, still not knowing what to do with what I’m looking at, but for the first time since the doorknob turned under my hand, I’m not having to figure it out alone. 

Chapter Four: The Empty Room

Further into the wing, I find a room that is somewhat finished. Walls painted. Floor laid. A window that lets in light at an angle I don’t recognize from anywhere else in the museum.

It is entirely empty.

I stand in the center of it and try to imagine what belongs here.

I can’t.

I try to picture a shape against the far wall, and the wall seems to shift before the image finishes forming. I try to imagine a color, something soft, and the light moves instead, sliding to a different corner, refusing to hold still long enough to be furnished.

This has never happened to me before. Every other room in this museum arrived already knowing what it was. The Room of Rage was always red. I didn’t choose that color so much as recognize it, the way you recognize your own name. The Hall of Melancholy came already dim, already quiet, already exactly the shade of grief it needed to be. I have spent my whole life as a curator who receives rooms fully formed and simply gives them their proper light.

I have never had to imagine a room into being before it exists.

And then, standing there in the unclaimed middle of it, it comes to me all at once, the way weather comes, the way you don’t feel a wave building until it’s already over you.

This room isn’t empty because I haven’t finished mourning something. This room is empty because it is waiting for someone…

Not a memory. Not an absence I could decorate with exquisite, practiced grief. A life. Coming. Real, in a way none of my other rooms have ever asked me to hold.

I sit down hard on the bare floor, because my legs no longer feel entirely mine to stand on.

I don’t know how long I stay there. Time does something strange in that room, stretching and folding in on itself, and I move through every version of myself I have ever been without leaving that one spot on the floor. I am the girl who first understood what the word barren might mean for her. I am the woman who painted the Hall of Melancholy with her own hands because no one else could get the shade of grief exactly right. I am the curator who stood beneath the silver letters and answered, over and over, what is a mother without children, certain I would spend the rest of my life answering it the same way.

I built an entire museum around the belief that this particular room would never exist. I did not build it carelessly. I built it with devotion, with precision, with a kind of loyalty I mistook for permanence. And now the very ground I stood that loyalty on is being reframed beneath me, wall by wall, without so much as asking whether I wanted to keep standing there.

I am not ready to be someone else. I only just finished becoming the woman who lived here.

I cry the way you cry when grief and disbelief arrive in the same body at once, with no instructions on which one to feel first. 

Before I leave, I notice something folded over the back of a chair I don’t remember being there. Soft fabric, neutral in color and small, the kind of small that makes no sense against the size of the room. I don’t touch it. I only look at it for a long moment before I go, the faint scent of something like clean cotton or baby powder following me out into the hallway.

Chapter Five: Tending What’s Unfinished

I don’t go looking for answers. I go looking for her. 

I find her in the Memorial Garden, hands in the soil, tending something that from a distance looks like dying and up close looks like becoming. The afternoon light falls low and gold across the beds, and I can smell rich earth and something green just beginning to push through it. The fountain turns its endless circle behind her, water catching the light in small bright pieces.

“Sarayu!” I say, and something in my voice must give me away, because she looks up immediately.

“You understand now…” she says. It isn’t a question.

“I don’t know how to understand something I spent years learning not to hope for.” I sit down hard on the cold stone bench beside her, the words coming faster than I mean them to. “I don’t know how to be the woman who built The Room of Rage and the woman standing in that room at the same time.”

“You don’t have to know yet.” Her voice is unhurried, the voice of someone who has watched a thousand seasons turn and never once been alarmed. She brushes dirt from her hands, and I notice how the soil has worked its way into the creases of her palms, how at home she looks with her hands in something growing. “The foundation you grieved on doesn’t get erased because a new room is going up beside it. It just isn’t the only room anymore.”

“I don’t know what to do with a room I can’t imagine.”

“You don’t have to furnish it today. You tend what’s in front of you. Right now that’s a shock, and a museum full of visitors who are going to notice something’s different, and a wing that isn’t finished. That’s enough for today.”

I sit with that for a long moment, watching the fountain, breathing in the smell of turned earth and the faint sweetness of something blooming nearby that I can’t name yet.

I don’t know when I’ll be ready to open the doors again. For now, I only know that I’m not. 

Chapter Six: The Force of Waiting

I keep the museum closed.

I write no explanation on the door beyond the sign I hang by hand.

 “Closed for renovation. Please come back.”

The Foyer of Questions goes quiet in a way it has never been quiet before. I stand under the silver letters some mornings, coffee cooling in my hands, and I look up at the words etched there. What is a mother without children? I have answered this question every day for years, in every gallery, for every visitor who walked through. I am not ready to touch the letters themselves. Not yet. I don’t know if they need a second question carved beside them, or if the whole sentence needs to come down, or if it simply needs to wait, the way the empty room waited, until I understood what I was actually looking at.

I spend my days moving between the wing and the rooms I already know, trying to hold both at once. I am not ready to stand in front of visitors and pretend the museum is the same building it was a season ago. I built my entire understanding of myself around the idea that this museum was finished, permanent, complete down to its last locked door. I called it whole.

Learning that wholeness was never the same thing as permanence is not a lesson I can absorb in an afternoon.

So the doors stay shut, and I stay inside them, and I begin the slow work of coming to terms with the fact that everything I thought was marble was actually something closer to clay. Still capable of being shaped. Still capable of changing beneath my own hands, whether I asked for the changing or not.

Most days, I spend with the three of them. Eli teaches me the shape of the new wing wall by wall, his hands guiding mine along studs and beams, showing me where the weight is meant to rest, which rooms are close to finished and which are still just frames waiting for walls. Sarayu tends the parts of me that get tired of not knowing, sitting with me on the evenings when the empty room still won’t let me imagine anything to put inside it, her presence as steady as the fountain that never stops turning. Jesse simply stays close, especially on the days when the not-knowing feels heaviest, sanding down whatever rough edge needs it, the smell of fresh shavings following him from room to room, making sure nothing about this new territory will hurt me on the way through.

There is a room in the new wing that needs furnishing before I can let anyone else see it. There is an entire hallway that needs walking, again and again, until it feels less like a stranger’s house and more like mine.

I am not ready to open the doors again. Not yet. Not until I understand what I’m going to show people when I do.

Chapter Seven: The Guest Book

One evening, I find myself back in the Foyer, standing beneath the guest book near the exit, the one visitors write in on their way out. I haven’t opened it in months. When I do, I find the entry I remember, the handwriting a little cramped, a little uncertain. “I couldn’t enter the room that doesn’t exist yet, it says. The one that comes after Force. I think you’re still building that room. I think maybe we all are.”

I close the book slowly. I had forgotten how exactly this was named, months before I ever felt the handle turn beneath my palm. Someone else stood in this building and felt the shape of what was coming before I let myself feel it at all.

The wing keeps changing under Eli’s hands, week by week, month by month, and I have stopped needing to measure it in numbers. I only know that it is nearer to finished than it was, and further from finished than it will be, and that whatever hour it opens its doors will likely be the same hour the museum opens its doors again.

I say this out loud to Sarayu one evening in the garden.

“I think I need help,” I tell her. “I can’t finish this alone. There’s too much left to decorate, too much I still don’t understand how to do.”

“You were never going to finish it alone,” she says. “There’s more help coming than you know.” 

Chapter Eight: Hands That Help

A few days later, Jesse tells me he has a surprise waiting in the wing. I follow him up the spiral staircase, through the Force, through the door that no longer feels quite so foreign under my hand.

The people I love are standing in the unfinished hallway.

Visitors who have come to this museum for years, the ones who know my rooms almost as well as I do, are here with their arms full of things, standing among the exposed beams and the plastic sheeting, waiting for me. Someone carries a stack of folded clothes in soft, neutral colors. Someone else leans an unassembled crib frame carefully against the unfinished wall. There are baskets wrapped in tissue paper, a small chair built for someone tiny, bottles still boxed, a crocheted blanket draped over an arm like it’s being kept warm before it’s needed. Eli is already showing one of them where a wall will go. Sarayu kneels beside an open basket, sorting through it with the same care she gives everything that grows.

I recognize the shape of what’s being built. I have recognized it for a while now, if I’m honest. I only haven’t let myself say its name out loud.

Someone presses a cup of something warm into my hands before I’ve even set down what I walked in carrying. Another leans in to tell me, quietly, that she brought the blanket because she remembered a story I told years ago about a grandmother’s quilt, back before any of this wing existed. I don’t remember telling her that story. I’m moved that she did.

I move through the room touching things I’m not ready to claim yet, the soft stack of clothes, the unassembled frame, the basket Sarayu is still sorting through, and no one asks me to explain what any of it means. They already know. They knew before I said a word.

At some point, someone hands me a paintbrush and nods toward the far wall, still bare beneath its plastic sheeting, and I understand without being told that they want this one thing to be mine. I paint a single stroke, uneven and a little too pale, and set the brush down, because it feels important that my hands touch this room too, even just once, even before it’s finished.

The rest of the day disappears into hands. Someone fits the crib frame together piece by piece while Eli holds it steady. Someone folds the clothes into a dresser that wasn’t there this morning. The blanket finds its place across the back of the rocking chair, and the baskets find shelves, and the bottles find a cabinet, and slowly, without me directing a single bit of it, the empty room I couldn’t imagine into being starts to look like somewhere someone could actually be brought home to.

The air smells like fresh paint and cut flowers someone has brought, the particular warmth of a room full of people who came because they wanted to. They have all been let in on this the way I never was, and instead of resenting it, I find myself grateful, the way you are grateful for people who show up to build something with you before you’ve even asked.

By the time the last of them go home, the room is no longer empty. It is only unfinished in the smallest ways now, waiting for one last quiet evening before it’s ready to be seen for what it is.

Chapter Nine: The Nursery

That night, once everyone has gone home and the wing has gone quiet again, I walk back to the room myself.

I stand in the doorway for a long moment before I go in.

Everything looks different in the stillness than it did surrounded by hands and voices earlier. The crib catches the last of the evening light instead of Eli’s hands steadying it. The blanket lies still across the rocking chair instead of being passed from person to person. The room isn’t finished being built so much as it’s finished being loud — and in the quiet, I can finally see it for what it is, rather than everything that happened to make it that way.

I have curated grief my whole life. I know exactly how a room is supposed to feel when it’s built to hold an absence. I know the particular quality of light for mourning, the particular silence for melancholy, the particular heat for rage. I have never once, in all my years as curator of this museum, stood in a room built to hold a presence instead.

It feels nothing like I expected.

There is no ache here. No dust waiting to settle. No echo. The room is warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. I sit down in the rocking chair, and for the first time since I found the door at the end of the Force, I feel something rise in my chest that I don’t immediately recognize, because I have felt it so rarely in this building.

It takes me a while to name it.

Joy. Plain, unguarded joy, without grief standing beside it asking to be acknowledged first.

I sit with it a while longer, letting my eyes move over the room the way you’d read something slowly on purpose, wanting to remember every line of it.

I have never called this room by name. Not once, not even to myself, not even in the privacy of my own thoughts. I called it the empty room. I called it the room I couldn’t imagine. I called it, some days, the room I was afraid of.

Sitting here now, in the quiet, with the crib and the chair and the blanket catching the last of the light, there’s only one word left for it.

The Nursery.

I say it out loud, just to hear it in my own voice, just to see if the room answers back the way every other room in this museum always has.

It does. And for the first time, so do I. 

Chapter Ten: A Conversation With the Three

Later, once I’ve sat with the room long enough to let it become real, I go looking for them. I find all three together for once, standing near the threshold where the new wing meets the old hallway, waiting the way I’m starting to understand they’ve always been waiting, patient in a way I’m only now learning to recognize.

I don’t say anything at first. I just stand there with them, looking back down the hallway toward The Nursery, then further back, toward the old galleries I can’t see from here but know are still standing.

“I keep thinking about the Foyer,” I finally say. “The silver letters. The morning air. How sacred it all felt, deciding whether someone was ready to go further before they’d even taken a step.”

“You built a room worthy of what it was going to hold,” Sarayu says. “Grief deserved a cathedral. You gave it one.”

“The Tender Galleries,” I say. “All that palatable grief. The godchildren’s cards, the lavender, love redirected into every soft corner I could find for it. I let people stop there because it was easier than showing them the rest.”

“It wasn’t dishonest,” Sarayu says. “Love redirected is still love. I tended every bit of it right alongside you. But you always knew it wasn’t the whole truth, even when it was the only room some visitors ever saw.”

“The Archive,” I say. “All those skills with nowhere to go. Checking fevers no one had. Singing lullabies to no one. I kept them anyway.”

“Inherited wisdom doesn’t require a recipient to be real,” Eli says. “You preserved it because you knew, somewhere under the not-knowing, that it wouldn’t stay unused forever.”

Jesse steps closer, and for the first time since I’ve known him, he isn’t sanding, isn’t checking a seam, isn’t making sure something won’t splinter. His hands are just still.

“The Hall of Melancholy,” he says, before I can. “The cedar chest. The rocking chair with nothing in it. The tests you couldn’t throw away because throwing them away would have meant pretending you never hoped. I sat with you in that cold room more mornings than you know. Not across from you. Beside you. Close enough that if you’d reached out, you’d have found me already reaching back.”

“I don’t remember feeling you there.”

“I know. That’s not the same as my not being there.” His voice doesn’t waver, but something in it aches. “I was in the Memorial Garden too, the mornings you needed to sit with pure loss without trying to turn it into something useful. And I was in the Room of Rage the day you screamed at the walls and meant every word of it. The unfairness of it. The single fact that it hadn’t happened. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t leave. I have never once left a room in this museum because it got too hard to stand in.”

“The Gallery of Acceptance took me years to walk into without flinching,” I say. “I used to think acceptance meant the end of hoping. I built it in the middle of the tour, not the end, because I never believed it was the final room. I don’t know if I believed anything came after it.”

“You were right not to put it last,” Sarayu says. “Acceptance was never meant to be a destination. It was only ever meant to teach you how to keep living inside a question that hadn’t been answered yet.”

“And the Observatory,” I say. “All that climbing, all that thin air, the telescopes pointed at futures I couldn’t picture yet. I told visitors it held possibility. I don’t think I believed, most days, that the possibility included this.”

“It held exactly this,” Eli says. “Every hour you spent up there was never wasted reaching. You were aiming at something real. You just couldn’t see this far yet.”

“And the Workshop,” I say, “connected straight to the Room of Rage, because that’s how it works. You don’t get to sanitize the walk from fury into creation. I built things there I didn’t know I was capable of building.”

“You were becoming something new in that room,” Jesse says. “Nothing about becoming is clean. I was there for the mess of it too.”

“Even the Gallery for Visitors,” I say quietly. “The room I never planned to build. The one I added because even I needed refuge from my own intensity. I sleep there most nights. I always told myself that wasn’t failure. Just rest.”

“It never was a failure,” Sarayu says. “Rest is its own kind of holy. I made sure of that myself.”

“And the guest book,” I say, looking at her now. “The visitor who felt a room he couldn’t enter. The one after the Force. He felt it before I did.”

“He felt it because we were already building it,” she says. “Long before you found the door. Long before you were ready to walk through it. Some things take shape long before the person living inside them can see the shape at all.”

I look at Eli last, the way I always seem to, saving him for when I need the answer that carries the most weight.

“You knew this the whole time?” I say. “Not just the wing. All of it. Since before the very first morning I stood under those silver letters and asked what I was, if not a mother.”

Eli is quiet for a moment, and when he speaks, his voice has none of its usual calm distance. It’s closer now, rougher at the edges, like something in him has been waiting a long time to say this plainly.

“I knew it before you knew grief,” he says. “I knew it when I laid the first foundation of this museum, before the Foyer had its silver letters, before the Force had a single mirror hung on its walls. I knew it in the Tender Galleries, and the Archive, and the Hall of Melancholy. I knew it in the Memorial Garden, and the Gallery of Acceptance, and every hour you spent climbing toward the Observatory reaching for a future you couldn’t yet see. I knew it in the Room of Rage, and the Workshop, and the Gallery for Visitors you built for yourself when even you needed rest. I was not absent from a single one of those rooms. I was drawing this the entire time, even the rooms I let you believe were the whole story.”

My eyes sting. “Then why did it take so long? Why did I have to build every single one of those rooms if you already knew where this was going?”

“Because none of those rooms were wasted,” he says. “Not one. You didn’t build the Tender Galleries for nothing. You didn’t survive the Room of Rage for nothing. You didn’t climb to that Observatory in the dark for nothing. Every gallery in this museum is still standing, and every one of them still matters, exactly as much as it ever did. This wing doesn’t erase any of it. It was only ever going to come after, never instead of.”

“This wing,” I repeat, and something in the way he said it makes me look past him, down the long unfinished hallway, at the doorframes still waiting for doors. “Not just the nursery.”

“This wing has a name,” Eli says. “It has had one since before you ever laid eyes on the door at the end of the Force.”

I wait.

“Motherhood” he says, and the word settles into the space between us like something set down after being carried a very long way. “The nursery is only the first room you’ve stood inside. There are others still framed in, still waiting on walls, still waiting for you to discover what they are. The whole of this wing carries that name. You’ve only just begun walking through it.”

I look at the three of them, standing together the way they’ve always stood together, even when I couldn’t see all three of them at once.

“I don’t know how to be her,” I say finally. “The woman who wrote that question in silver letters, and the woman standing in this hallway tonight. I don’t know how to be both at the same time.”

“You don’t have to choose between them,” Eli says. “The foundation doesn’t change because the house grows a new wing. She’s not gone. She’s not replaced. She’s still standing exactly where you left her, and she gets to watch this too.”

“You’ll know what to say when it’s time,” Jesse says. “You always have. Every visitor who ever stood in front of you looking for the right words, you found them. This will be no different.”

“And you won’t be tending to it alone,” Sarayu says. “You were never tending any of it alone. Not the rooms behind you. Not the ones still ahead.”

She takes my hand, the way she has a hundred times before, and doesn’t let go. For a moment none of us says anything at all. We just stand there together at the threshold, the old museum behind us and the new wing ahead, three sets of hands that never once let go, even in all the years I couldn’t feel them holding on.

Under Construction

Eventually, the three of them go back to the wing, back to the studs and the framing and the rooms still waiting for walls. I don’t follow them tonight. I go back to the Foyer instead, alone, not because I’m pulling away from them, but because some things I have to sit with by myself before I can carry them anywhere else.

The silver letters still catch what’s left of the evening light. What is a mother without children? I look at the question a long time. I don’t take it down. I don’t carve anything beside it. Some questions, I am learning, are not meant to be replaced. They are only meant to be joined by other questions, other rooms, other seasons standing next to them instead of them.

I think of you, still out there somewhere, waiting for me to open the doors again.

The truth is, I’m not sure yet what opening the doors again will even look like. Maybe the old galleries welcome visitors the same way they always did, once I’m ready. Maybe, for a while, I simply live in this new wing without inviting anyone else through it, the way you live in a house before you host anyone in it. The grief rooms aren’t gone. They aren’t locked forever, either. They’re only quiet right now, the way a room goes quiet when the person who used to sit in it has, for the moment, somewhere else to be.

The museum is not finished. It may never be finished again, not in the way I once believed it was.

The nursery is ready. The mother is not finished becoming yet.

I don’t know what I’ll look like on the other side of this wing. I only know that I am walking toward it, and that three sets of hands are walking with me, and that for the first time since a handle turned beneath my palm in a room full of mirrors, I am not afraid of the building site.

I am only grateful for the hands that are helping me construct it.

The museum is under construction.

Maybe it always was. Maybe that was the truest thing anyone could have written above the door, from the very beginning.