These were written before this place existed.

The Journals

They contain what I noticed then, what I believed then, what I misunderstood, forgot, abandoned, imagined, and occasionally saw more clearly than I realized.

I am reading them again now.

The past has been left where it was. My understanding of it continues to change.

The Excavation

For years, these journals sat mostly untouched.

Now I am reading them again—not to recover a definitive version of who I was, but to encounter the person who actually wrote them.

Sometimes I recognize her. Sometimes I don’t.

She left the words behind. I am meeting them from somewhere else now.

Before continuing—

These pages were not written for this exhibit.

Some I still recognize.
Some I no longer believe.
Some make me laugh.
Some surprise me.

They remain as they were.

FROM THE EXCAVATION

I Lied to Make It Seem I Wasn’t Unloved

An excavation in progress

JOURNAL - c. APRIL 24-MAY 11, 2016

“ I lied to others quite a bit to make it seem that I wasn’t loved.

I told kids that my father bought me a Corvette—purple—license plates PRNCLVR.

Also told a friend that I got a puppy and my dad made him roller skates—

got caught in this fabrication—

I remember apologizing but can’t remember if I spoke from my heart in explanation or not—

I hope so and maybe I did because no one else ever mentioned it at school.”

This is the excavation.

ALSO ON THE PAGE

Prince songs for a playlist. Heard here.

Another appearance: Seeker of Shells.

A declaration that “my being needs to try to make a difference in this world.”

Words crossed out, reconsidered and inserted.

The page isn’t particularly orderly…neither, apparently, was my mind.

CURRENT - SEPTEMBER 2026

I remembered this as a sentence about leaving.

At the time, I was preparing to move out of the home I shared with my husband and into an apartment of my own. I felt closed in. I wanted more room.

Nearly ten years later, the sentence opened somewhere else.

I had built ideas, identities, projects and worlds—and repeatedly outgrown their containers.

Now I am reading those words while building a museum designed to keep acquiring rooms.

She wasn’t writing about The Perception Field.

But I recognize myself in what she wrote.

CURRENT - SEPTEMBER 2026

I remembered the puppy.

I remembered telling a friend that I had gotten one and that my dad had made it roller skates. I remembered getting caught in the lie and the awful feeling that came with it.

What I don’t remember was how I had understood the lie when I wrote about it years later:

I lied to others quite a bit to make it seem that I wasn’t unloved.

I stopped when I read that.

When I wrote those words in 2016, I was already looking backward.

Prince had just died, and his death had sent me into a fierce revisiting of the years when I first fell in love with him.

I was remembering what he had meant to me, but I was also remembering the girl I had been when he entered my life—a girl whose life had already become difficult.

The story about the puppy was one of the memories that surfaced during that return.

Now, reading this page again, something else catches my attention.

My father is in both stories.

He bought the Corvette and he made the puppy roller skates.

I don’t know what that meant to the girl who told those stories. I also don’t know whether the purple corvette came with those license plates in the original lie or details I added while remembering it in 2016.

And I don’t read this page as proof my parents didn’t love me. That’s not something I’m interested in establishing.

What I have is something smaller and perhaps more interesting: a child who told stories, a woman in 2016 trying to understand why she had told them, and the woman reading those words now.

All three are looking at the same life from different places.

I don’t know yet what I think this means.