Eddy Laughter

And I'm by myself, and I'm walking, and I turn to my left, and I see this long hallway, and at the end of the hallway is this wall that looks like it's made out of a bunch of small tiles.

And I get closer and realize that they're not tiles, but they're actually very, very small portraits of, like, photographs of people who entered and died in Auschwitz.

And there are so many of them.

They go all the way down this hallway.

They turn the corner and there are these pillars in the museum, just architecturally, and they wrap around.

And I'm overcome with this...

this wave of like this urge to make eye contact with each and every one of the pictures and I feel like I need to give them the space that I owe them and like take my time and try to give all of my attention to them and I physically cannot do that but I'm trying my hardest in this sort of like frantic fashion of making eye contact with everyone and

The pictures start to feel different.

All of a sudden they feel like a mirror and I see parts of my own face there.

I see my nose and my eyes, something about my bone structure and my hair.

And it's overwhelming and it's terrifying.

My mom would talk about feeling like she looked really Jewish in certain places when there weren't a lot of other Jewish people around.

I never knew what that meant and then all of a sudden it makes sense.

It clicks and it clicks in a crushing way.

And I was someone who was very familiar with the concept of loneliness.

I felt really isolated at school, in middle school, and I was really, when I would walk down a hallway, it felt like I was lonely to the point where it felt corrosive in my body.

But this loneliness that I feel in this museum is not like anything I had experienced before.

It's like the museum had singled out me and left me somewhere stranded, and I was almost in free fall.

It was so much that when I eventually left the exhibit, all I wanted to do was find someone to talk about this with, and so I'm going up to people in my class and trying to relay the information that this museum is apparently about me, specifically.

My classmates don't really seem to get how shocking this feels.