On this museum bench, I search for something like courage. I look in the reflected light off the statue’s back for a way to say, I look in the squinting stone eyes for self-assured words to tell my parents I’m dating a woman, calf green and soft as zucchini skin. Six hands with fingers wrap around each other and space—I am not a man who spends his life exploring the female nude in stone. I am not hairless in a way that indicates 5th century serenity. But I don’t tell my parents this. I tell them very little, except that she is an architect. And then I walk into the next room of smaller statues lit (finally) by natural light. I keep my face neutral through the rest of the museum as if any reaction of mine would make the world a more reactive place.

For Halloween, I dress as a blueberry, construction paper leaf clipped to my hair. Paper and hair—oh to cut away at both at once. The rose stems have been sliced diagonally to increase absorbent surface. Or perhaps the painter did not think of this detail. For Halloween, I follow my animal instinct and store glucose in every inch of my body, I speak loudly at the party and laugh when no one else does, and somehow I do not cut myself while carving the acorn squash. The roses fold onto themselves like waves—I am thinking of solving the problem of unpredictable curls, the problem of hat hair, by shaving my head and then bleaching it. Somehow, I am not embarrassed of myself these days, not even when I try and fail to shoplift construction paper at Dollarama. Somehow, the petals are made of paint and will neither die nor curl in any other direction but inwards; exactly as they were in 1904, they are now, and ever will be.

In Renaissance, I scour the suit section, slosh one bad look against the last, the aisle a cocktail of missing buttons and rotting shoulder pads. If felt has healing powers, then so does the plastic print peeling off an SPQR tourist hoodie. If art is a medium for social change then so is a deep belly breath. A suit for me is not a suit for most models. If a felt suit were to appear like a wave against my shopping hands, I would buy it no matter the size. I’d become a tree in it: a brown, still, sexless thing, hands rooted in pockets. My bark will soften this coming winter. My felted hands will extend towards the sun.