I'll miss all this.
Dawid Majewski portrays Jagoda Łętowska for the Rush Museum print collection.
I sometimes look around my apartment and have a strange thought.
My girl is sitting beside me at her desk, reading or studying. The room is quiet. My books are where they always are. A few familiar pieces of furniture. My motorcycle just outside, only a few steps away, close enough that I could almost see it if I leaned out of the window in front of me now. Ordinary things, really. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would seem especially important to anyone else.
And yet I know that one day, years from now, I may think of this time and feel something close to homesickness for it.
I may think, damn, I would give a lot to walk back into this room for ten minutes.
I suppose most of us are old enough to know that feeling. Not just missing people, but missing a season of life. A house. A street. The way the light fell in a certain place. The objects that were there when we were becoming who we are.
Maybe that is part of what we really are in the end.
Not only memory, but the things that remain around it.
The company of the same person. A bookshelf that has followed us through different years. A chair with its own history. A jacket kept longer than it should have been. A motorcycle one hopes will stay until it is old beyond repair, though in my case it is a Honda, so probably not.
That thought has been on my mind lately because it says something important about what we do at Rush Museum.
Things that disappear quickly deserve greater care.
Not everything, of course. Most things can pass. Most things should. But certain forms of beauty feel more fragile than they first appear. They are easy to flatten, easy to rush past, easy to lose inside the speed of everything else.
That is why I have always felt they deserve a different treatment.
Not more exposure. Not more noise. Just more care.
An object can do that. It can give a fleeting photograph a more lasting place. It can hold a way of seeing that might otherwise vanish. It can remain in a home long after a particular season of life has gone, and still return something real to the person who lives with it.
I think that matters more as one gets older.
Not because we become sentimental, but because we become better at recognising what was worth keeping.
That, to me, is one of the reasons these things still matter.
Hugs,
Fran Domínguez
Founder & Creative Director, Rush Museum