It was the mid zeroes, and, barely an adult, I considered everything I did during that week in London a life-altering experience. Staying at the studio of my friend Titus, a fashion photographer I knew through a website I remember as mailfriends.com, I took in every second of my first solo trip abroad.

My very first (and the high I’m still chasing) fish and chips rolled into a grease-covered newspaper. The Virgin Megastore in Piccadilly Circus where, a year later, we would spot one of Banksy’s fake copies of that Paris Hilton album. The weirdly polite British “excuse me” offered whenever I stepped on someone’s toes on the tube. Watching Hard Candy twice in a row, Mulholland Drive thrice. Looking back, everything from then feels like a museum.

There is one moment that lingers twenty years later.

Picture me entering the National Portrait Gallery for a photo exhibit, and walking heart-first into a room with an enormous print of a woman in complete disarray. Cheeks red from hours of crisis, a frown pressed into her forehead, shoulders held up as if tenseness were the only form of comfort she had left to know. I cried as I stood motionless in the room for what felt like an hour.

I treated myself to the exhibit book. Back home at Titus’ place, on page 9, the photo, which had won best portrait, stared at me again. Reading the byline, I discovered the photographer Karoline Hjorth had simply captured her sister Siri fresh out of bed on a normal day. I wonder if I was the only person who misinterpreted the photograph. I also wonder, and have for the past two decades, whether my reaction divulges subconscious opinions on women and makeup.

I can still recognise Siri by the tip of her nose when I look for her and find she is now a visual artist.

This essay participated in the March 2026 edition of the IndieWeb Carnival by James, which was about museum memories.