The In-Between Room

A dialogue between myself, the dead, and the image.

Chelsea, Manhattan.
What am I doing here? I hate cities. If crystals are meant to channel energy, then maybe brick and concrete erase it—grinding you down until even your memories feel borrowed. I’m here to meet with a woman who’s been dead for 15 years. Although today, she is very much alive.

Louise Bourgeois sits in a gothic chair, her small body engulfed by carved wood, yet her birdlike presence commands the room. The Attendant leans against the wall, patient as a shadow, his dry half-smile giving nothing away.

On the wall, my girl swings eternally in her frame, a speech bubble above her head:
“What a shame that a child of seven should look so sad.”

I sit opposite Louise, my chair absurdly small, like a child at a tea party.

She fixes me with her gaze.
“This is the entertainment you bring me? Your art?”

I take a deep breath and can’t help but notice the faint smell of tangerines in the air.
“Yes,” I say. “Echoes of Seven.”
She leans forward. “The child is you.”
It isn’t a question.

“Maybe,” I try for humour. “I loved the swings once. Now they just make me dizzy. Those days are gone.”
Louise snorts. “The swing is not for comfort. It is for memory. That is why you are still on it.”

The Attendant shifts against the wall. “You chose Photoshop because you’re scared of failing with your hands.”
I say nothing. I know what he’s getting at. Can I really call this artwork mine if the fragments are stolen from someone else’s?
I shift in my seat, afraid to say what we are probably all thinking.

Louise’s finger traces the arc of the swing. “She is not happy, this child. You put her on a stage, but she refuses to play the part. She looks only to the window, to somewhere else.”
I wonder why I don’t just do the same.

Why am I here, letting them dissect me?

***

The silence hangs heavy, like the pause after a row at a family gathering—everyone waiting, not sure if another round is coming. Am I supposed to break the silence? I am the one who has chosen to come here, shouldn’t I do the talking? I feel like I need permission to speak, or that if I say something, what I say won’t sound real.

Louise studies Echoes of Seven, brow tight, mouth unimpressed. The Attendant flicks his gaze between the work and me, I see a faint smirk tugging at his lips - he must see pretenders like me all the time.

I clear my throat. “I created it in Photoshop, but the parts are real -they still mean something.” But what does it mean? The question drilled into me at art school. What does it mean?

Louise cuts in. “It is collage. Nothing new.”

“Yes,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “But is anything ever new?”

The Attendant tilts his head, eyes flicking towards me. “Memory, dressed up for the gallery. Hiding behind nostalgia, hoping it passes for depth.”

“It’s not,” I shoot back. “It’s salvage. I don’t make it for the gallery”

Louise’s gnarled fingers twist at the cane. She repeats, “The girl is you — and you bring attention to your pain.”

“She is me but also she isn’t, not exactly. I think I’m all of them — the figures, the room itself, even.”

Louise leans back. “You’re sentimental. You want sympathy and control at the same time.”

Sentimental, I think, considering the word.

“Sentimental? Or just mental?” I laugh, sharply. “Yeah, you could say that, Louise. I’m definitely sentimental, but control? I don’t even understand what that means.” This—” I tap the print— “is the closest I’ve come.”

The image shimmers for a second, as if agreeing.

Louise narrows her eyes. “You don’t trust this medium. There is shame in you.”

I swallow hard. “It’s not shame. It just lets me do things I could never manage with a pencil or brush. I can break and mend without making wounds.”

The Attendant chuckles. “It’s safer than sewing.”

“Thank you, Attendant” I say, “and less mess on the floor.”

Louise waves her hand like she’s swatting a fly. “You hide in screens. You should face reality.”

“Finding solace is reality,” I say, voice low now. “I don’t even know why I made this, or why I’m showing it. But if I keep it hidden, I’m denying the parts of myself still calling to be seen. I want to be vulnerable — I feel the pain is in the showing, not the creating.”

Louise squints, her silence suddenly heavier than her words.

***

Louise’s eyes drop to my hands.
“You have the hands of a typist. Disappointing.”

I glance at my knuckles.
“And what’s wrong with typists?”

“Typists remember nothing. True memory lives in the hand — needle, chisel, knife. The body remembers; you do not.”

The Attendant smirks, glancing at Louise.
“Or with drinking, in some circles.”

“I thought people drank to forget, not remember,” I mutter.

She ignores us both. “When did you last use your hands for something real?”

Heat rises in my neck. “I used them to make this,” I say, pointing to Echoes of Seven.

Louise scoffs. “Nonsense. You use your hands only to click a button.”

“Not everyone has a studio, Louise."

Her lips curl. “You want to hurt me? But you also want me to say you’ve done well.”

I point to the girl on the swing. “She doesn’t want to be rescued. She’s waiting for someone to admit what she already knows — that childhood isn’t innocence, it’s endurance.”

Louise studies the swing, her face flickering with some memory. “Misery isn’t enough. You need repair.”

I laugh. “Repair? Says the woman who turned her mother’s bedsheets into relics.”

The Attendant allows himself the faintest twitch of a smile.“Touché.”

Louise grips her cane.

I glance at Echoes of Seven. “She doesn’t want repair. She wants the truth acknowledged.”

Louise narrows her eyes. “Truth is never enough. Without repair, it festers. Art is not testimony — it is surgery.”

“Or autopsy,” Jerry mutters.

Her cane taps once against the floor, sharp. “Yes. Exactly.”

The print shifts — shadows deepen, colours bleed.

“It’s changing,” I whisper.

Louise leans forward. “Unstable. You want to destabilize the narrative.”

“I want to live with it,” I say. “All of it — not just what fits in a white box.”

She exhales. “That is the only way to survive.”

Silence stretches. Then: “Show me. Show me how your stolen fragments can hold memory. Make it hurt.”

I nod. “Okay. I’ll show you.”

Louise’s eyes glisten, but her voice is steady. “Then I will judge.”

The swing girl still faces the window, caught between inside and out.

Louise scans Echoes of Seven, her eyes finding every fault line I tried to disguise. “Digitally created memory is no memory at all,” she declares. “There is no suffering.”

My hands clench. “If you saw my desktop folders, you’d know there’s suffering.”

The Attendant chuckles whilst gazing out of the window.

Louise steps closer. “The girl - your girl - she lacks weight.”

“She’s a comic clipping,” I say. “She’s not meant to carry it all.”

“Children always carry it,” Louise retorts. “You are the one who refuses.”

As she speaks, the reds in the picture deepen, the colours bleeding through the girl’s blouse. The swing rope strains.

The Attendant notices. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“No,” I murmur.

***

Louise’s palm hovers near the print. “Unstable. It’s not finished with you yet.”

The lovers lean closer, the Deco woman seems to exhale. For a moment, the girl on the swing turns her head and raises her eyes, meeting mine. I recoil.

“She’s an orphan,” The Attendant says softly.

The words sting.

Louise nods, almost gently. “Yes. And you are her mother. So what will you do with her?”

I don’t answer. I step closer, whispering, “This is the in-between.”

Louise studies me, then the print. “Find the weight. Now hold it.”

We fall silent. On the paper, the girl turns back toward the window.

***

The print breathes again—reds pulse, ropes fray, shadows lengthen. “The Deco woman dips her chin—first in judgment, then in pity.” The composition rearranges itself in the silence.

I want to dismiss it as a trick of the light, but we all see it. The Attendant’s arms fold tighter, Louise drills her gaze into me. She wants a confession of fraud.

“I don’t even like it half the time,” I blurt.

“Why bring it then?” The Attendant asks.

“It won’t leave me alone. I’ve hidden it for years, but it keeps resurfacing.”

Louise studies the swing girl. “You want to destroy it, but you want it to outlive you too. You’ve made a little house for your sadness, furnished with secondhand scraps.”

“No!” I shoot back.

She clasps her hands in her lap, knuckles white. “So you steal. Cinema. Postcards. Comics.”

“Art’s always been theft,” I say. “Even your spiders were copies.”

She almost smiles. “The first was my mother. The rest were shadows. Yours is the same - echoes.”

She tilts her head. “You want memory without responsibility. The image shifts so you’re never to blame.”

“I didn’t ask to remember. But if I must, I’d rather do it on my own terms.”

“Too easy,” Louise mocks, her thin arms snapping upward like wings.

The Attendant snorts, his voice too loud for the hollow room. “Louise only likes things that bleed. And you? You don’t dare bleed. You want sympathy without sacrifice.”

The swing girl shifts, crooked now, resisting order. I want to reach in and straighten her, but I hold still.

“Why is she sad?” Louise asks.

“Because she isn’t supposed to be.”

Her presence swells until the room feels smaller. “You demand to be remembered!”

The words ripple out, filling the space between us.

The Attendant murmurs, almost amused, “She just wants you to admit you care if anyone’s watching. You pretend you don’t want an audience. But this whole room is a stage you built.”

He’s right. I want witnesses. I buried my work, thinking I was safe from judgment. But the burial was denial, and denial gave the piece its life.

***

Louise exhales, her cane striking the floor like a gavel. “That is why you make art. To be remembered - and to remember yourself.”

The Attendant mutters, almost to the window, “Or to keep the ghosts busy while you pretend you’re free.”

A sense of tranquility washes over me.

“I cannot make someone hurt, Louise. Pain is not mine to give. The Echoes wait, silent, until someone brings their own memory to it. If it wounds, it is because they recognise themselves, not because I have cut them. You ask me to make it hurt, but I do not own hurt. What I make are fragments — fragile, unstable, incomplete. They do not demand pain; they invite presence.

If ghosts rise, they rise because the viewer calls them forth. My task is not to injure, but to witness. And in that witnessing, perhaps, something begins to mend.”

The room quiets again. The print doesn’t settle; it hums.

The swing girl looks past all of us, waiting for something we can’t give.