I met Shoshana in the fall of my second year at Cranbrook, at a time when my life felt stretched between two cities, two futures, and two versions of myself. Lynn had returned to Minneapolis after our cross-country trip, leaving me unsteady, ambitious, and ravenous for meaning. I was still reeling from Germano Celant’s scalding critique — “a conceptual artist without an idea” — and the long afternoon I spent in tears on the Mark di Suvero swing. I was building the Toy Globe obsessively, not yet realizing it would be the flawed stepping stone that led me toward deeper, truer work.

Into that unsettled landscape walked Shoshana — quiet, observant, and newly arrived at Cranbrook for graduate work in printmaking. She carried herself with the tentative grace of someone rebuilding after a long period of being unseen. I learned slowly that she had recently lost sixty pounds, not out of vanity but as part of reclaiming her life after a painful divorce. There was a softness about her, and beneath it a will that surprised me.

One afternoon she approached me in the hallway and asked, almost shyly, if I would pose for an etching — a line that, in retrospect, carried the deliciously high‑culture equivalent of “come up and see my etchings” I said yes, imagining a simple figure study, completely unaware of the reverse irony that I was about to be the one exposed.

But when she pulled the first proof from the press, I stopped breathing.

She had revealed something I didn’t know was in me — a raw, unguarded presence, stripped of performance or cleverness. It startled me because it wasn’t the self I imagined, yet it was unmistakably mine. She looked at me across the press bed with a quiet steadiness, as if to say, I see the part you hide. And I’m not afraid of it.

That was the beginning.

Our connection grew slowly — dinners, late-night conversations, long winter walks across the famous Cranbrook campus between studios. We didn’t define it. We didn’t need to. It was the kind of intimacy that grows in the cracks between ambition and loneliness. She watched me struggle with the Toy Globe; I watched her carve lines into copper with a precision I envied. For a brief span of months, love and art braided themselves together in the way they often do when life still feels like a series of open doors.

But Lynn remained an unresolved gravitational force. Not in a clean or grown-up way — in the conflicted way young artists confuse longing with destiny. When the year ended, I made the decision that broke something in both of us. I left for Minneapolis. There was no fight, no accusation. Just a quiet ache, a door closing before either of us was ready.

And yet she stayed with me — not Shoshana herself, but the mirror she held up, the truth she revealed, the knowledge that someone had once seen me more clearly than I had seen myself.

One year later, when I was preparing to assist Siah Armajani with an installation at a sculpture park in the Hudson Valley, I called her. I didn’t know what I expected, only that I wanted to see her again. She said yes.

Her yes is where the next story begins. But since it’s also where it ends, let’s continue.