Zola's internship gallery was held under the name of a foundation. The name sounded respectable and neutral—nothing as brazenly stamped with "buying and selling" as a commercial gallery, and nothing like a museum with its inborn aura of authority. A foundation was more like a carefully painted buffer zone—between academia and the market, between ideals and reality—quietly so, restrained, never in a hurry to take a stance.
At first, she carried into this internship a hope that was almost naïve.
She thought she would stand before paintings and learn how to "see." She thought she would be admitted into discussions, allowed to listen to those profound conversations about art history, ideas, the world. She thought she might finally draw close to that realm she had looked up to in books again and again—if only from the threshold.
Reality, however, was quieter than she had imagined.
The daily work was trivial and repetitive: logging inventory numbers, checking dimensions, medium, dates; turning through worn exhibition catalogues and comparing photographs to objects to see whether they were the same piece; entering one painting after another into the system, making sure every field was "not wrong." She learned to wear white gloves. She learned to keep the proper distance when moving a work. She learned to describe—using the least emotion possible—something that ought to have stirred emotion.
She was allowed to look, yet she always stood on the outer rim of discourse.
Sometimes she was sent to the records room. It was stacked with yellowing documents: correspondence between artists and collectors, ledgers left behind at the time of early donations. The paper was old; the handwriting was neat to the point of restraint, but the content was mostly calm to the point of coldness—donation numbers, provenance statements, condition notes, transfer clauses. Page by page, she began to understand the other face of the so-called "art world": more an accumulation of systems, procedures, and language than the clash of ideas she had imagined.
Occasionally, she followed a curator to attend ceremonies for the donation of rare books or art documents. She stood off to the side, watched donors exchange pleasantries with the institution, listened to them speak—still in a register she had not fully mastered—about editions, origins, annotations, trajectories of transmission. None of the words were obscure; yet once strung together, they became an invisible threshold, a door that held her firmly outside.
She could understand every word, but she could not understand the ease.
Little by little, she realized she was not "not working hard enough," nor was she simply "unable to keep up." Her problem was subtler—and harder to say aloud.
She was stuck.
It did not show up in her grades. On the contrary, she never made major mistakes. Her essays were properly structured, her citations correct, her arguments cautious and steady. The comments she got were often: "solid," "meticulous," "clear and well organized."
In class, the professor would stand before the projector, put up a painting, and ask a question so simple it was almost cruel:
"What do you see in this painting?"
Zola was always the first to lower her eyes.
She saw color, composition, brushwork. She also saw dates, schools, contexts. Her mind could summon information from the textbook at high speed; she knew which statements were "right," which could "stand up." But she did not dare to speak.
She did not know whether what she "saw" counted.
She remembered freshman year: a classmate—a white boy—interpreted a painting in a way she had thought, at the time, was "completely unreliable." In her eyes it was almost casual, even a little offensive. She sucked in a breath in her head and thought: He dares to say that?
But the professor smiled. His eyes lit up.
"That's a startling reading."
In that moment, Zola felt the world sway, just slightly.
She realized that until then she had been living inside an "absolute" system: right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, standard answers and wrong answers. When faced with something outside her value system, her instinct was rejection—This isn't right. When faced with a non-mainstream aesthetic, she reflexively sneered—This is ugly.
But an art history classroom did not run on that logic.
On midterms and finals, there were almost no multiple-choice questions. What mattered was not whether you had memorized all the dates and movements—of course those could not be wrong; you could not call Van Gogh's sunflowers Monet's water lilies—but rather, beyond that, what the professor truly cared about was:
How do you see it?
The question made her panic.
Because she did not know whether her "how" was permitted.
She began to understand that what art history really taught was not conclusions, but methods; not answers, but how you arrived at an answer. And her predicament was that she did not even feel sure she was qualified to set out.
Language was the first obstacle. Her English was reliable, functional—but not the kind that could carry confidence and risk. She feared that once she opened her mouth she would expose not only the rawness of her ideas, but also class, background, the path she had grown up on. She feared people would see, in her wording, her hesitation, her accent, her "provincialness."
So she chose silence.
She thought silence was caution, humility, reverence for learning. But as time went on, she realized silence was slowly turning into self-muting.
She was already in her second year.
Thank God, first-year grades did not count. But that small relief did not truly comfort her, because she knew the real problem was not her marks but that psychological distance she could not cross. She watched her classmates as if they already knew the rules of the game: daring to speak, daring to test, daring to be wrong. Beside them, she was like someone standing on the shore—knowing the water might not be deep, yet never daring to wade in.
That first spark of yearning—the one that had made her choose art history—was gradually rubbed, over long repetition, into a kind of internal erosion.
She still loved looking at paintings. She would stay in museums for a long time, alone in a corner, staring at a canvas until she drifted. But the private tremor of those moments could not be smoothly translated into words in the classroom, let alone into an "academic" stance.
She began to doubt herself.
Maybe she was only someone who loved looking at paintings—nothing more.
Maybe she had wandered into a world that did not belong to her.
The doubt was not dramatic. It was persistent, sticky, consuming her like a low fever. She neither gave up nor could she call it perseverance. She simply went to the internship on time every day, attended class on time, submitted assignments on time—moving forward along a track that looked normal, while faintly feeling she was jammed at some invisible joint.
What she did not know was that this stuckness was precisely where she was truly beginning to learn art history.
Only at this point, Zola did not have the ability to recognize that.
All she knew was that she was becoming quieter, more cautious, less willing to affirm any judgment that rose from inside. And that state was eerily similar to the survival skills she had learned in childhood—don't grab the floor, don't make mistakes, don't become the one who gets noticed.
She thought she was studying art history.
But what she was really facing was how to relearn how to step forward, in a world that allowed—even encouraged—expression, and say:
This is what I see.
And that step—she still could not cross it.
She wanted a word of approval so badly, even just a single interesting.
But in so many contexts, interesting was never a safe word.
Zola learned that quickly.
In some classes, when a professor used a light, airy tone to call a comment interesting, the air in the room often tightened in a subtle way. It was not praise, and it was not rejection. It was more like a polite suspension—I heard you, but I don't plan to follow you any further.
Sometimes interesting meant: You're a little off, but I can't be bothered to correct you.
Sometimes it meant: This is immature, but we won't point it out—for now.
More often it meant: You haven't actually touched the core of the question.
Later, Zola learned to distinguish the tone. And because of that, she developed an almost physical vigilance toward the word. She would rather hear That's wrong than hear this vague, courteous, mid-air evaluation again. Yet it was precisely this kind of evaluation she received most.
Meanwhile, her internship life began to be occupied by another kind of activity.
The foundation's gallery did not exist only in daylight. More often, it came alive at night—in charity dinners, donor cocktail receptions, private previews. As an intern, Zola was often "conveniently" brought along.
Very quickly, she understood her role.
Not a guest.
Not a participant.
Certainly not someone expected to speak.
Her job was simple and definite: errands. Showing the way, passing drinks, checking names on lists, filling gaps in corners. When necessary, she stood in an unobtrusive position, ensuring the scene looked like it was running smoothly.
A backdrop.
That was the word she used for herself, inside her head.
She learned how to stand correctly without standing out, how to find a corner among perfume and tailored suits that neither blocked anyone's path nor drew attention. On those nights she watched people flow in and out—collectors, curators, art advisers, potential donors—each one seeming to wear a layer of light cut especially for occasions like this.
She did not belong to that light.
With clothing, she was especially careful.
The ring Alex had given her earlier—bold design, sharp facets—was almost impossible to ignore under lights. She had worn it once and then never took it out again. It was too bright, bright like a declaration—and a declaration was the last thing she needed right now.
What she chose instead was a string of pearls Marco had given her long ago.
Not ostentatious. Very classic—perhaps too safe. But precisely because of that, it could go with anything: it would not go wrong, would not steal the frame, would not invite extra eyes.
She told herself this was exactly appropriate.
She did not need to shock the room. No one expected her to.
So she stood there, pearls resting against her collarbone, light falling on other people. Her presence was, in just the right way, not too much.
But this not too much did not bring ease.
On the contrary, at those dinners she felt a slow, sustained discomfort. Not open humiliation, not outright exclusion, but something more hidden—being seen, yet not truly regarded.
She watched others exchange pleasantries, swap business cards, laugh softly. She understood most of what they talked about, yet she was rarely included. It was like watching through a sheet of clear glass: she could see the bustle, but there was always a distance.
Sometimes she thought of Alex. No new invitation, no explicit goodbye—only a blank space gradually widening. She did not know what it meant. Was he bored? Had other plans? Or had she always been only a stage of the way? She had no answer.
Emily, too, appeared less and less.
Or rather: Emily still appeared, only in another form—always busy. Busy with her business, busy with her projects, busy with a world Zola had not yet fully learned. They exchanged messages now and then—polite, brief, like two tracks already beginning to diverge.
The distance had no drama, but it left Zola with a persistent loss.
She found, to her surprise, that her unease in these settings—her silence in class, her marginal position at the internship—was the same feeling. Not a lack of ability, but a matter of position.
Her position was always arranged for her.
She could look at paintings, but she did not interpret.
She could attend the dinners, but she did not enter the core.
She could be brought along, but she was seldom kept.
None of it was cruel. It was simply unmistakably clear.
She began to realize that art history, the gallery, the foundation, the charity dinners—these were not separate worlds at all, but a whole interlocking system. And she was standing in a place the system allowed her to enter, but had not yet granted power.
That stuckness was no longer only academic.
It spread into her life.
She still showed up at the gallery on time, still finished what she was told, still maintained a proper smile at the dinners. She looked as if everything was normal—she even looked as if she had adapted well. But only she knew that the erosion was slowly changing her.
Not crushing her—
sanding her down.
She expressed less and less, grew more and more careful, grew used to waiting for instructions. She developed a complicated dependence on being needed, while also knowing that need could be replaced at any moment.
She did not know where all of this would take her.
She only knew that on those bright nights, between artworks being discussed, priced, donated, her body stood there—while her heart remained suspended.
Like an object not yet archived, not yet named, not yet truly understood.
Zola had not snapped awake all at once.
It was more like a slowly forming discomfort—accumulating, drop by drop, in details that surfaced again and again, and yet were never spoken of.
The foundation gallery's storage rooms were never open to the public. Access controls, CCTV, key cards—everything was there, looking strict and professional. The first time she went in, she even had the illusion of being sheltered by the institution: everything here, she thought, was properly guarded.
But the longer she stayed, the more she sensed that this "strictness" was closer to a façade.
She noticed that there were not many places that actually required a card swipe. Many doors, once opened, could lead naturally into several areas. There were permission divisions, yes—but they were not necessarily enforced. The use of keys and cards relied more on who you were than on whether you were supposed to be there.
Some procedures existed in black and white in the rules, yet had never truly landed.
Some checks were tacitly allowed to be "made up later."
Some records existed only in a single, lonely file, never cross-verified.
What unsettled her most was the smoothness no one questioned.
Objects were taken out, put back, moved, temporarily stored. Each action looked reasonable; taken together, they formed a passage with almost no resistance. No one deliberately crossed boundaries, but no one truly stood guard at the boundary either.
She realized that if someone really wanted to do something here, it would not take much.
Only time.
And a trust that was quietly assumed.
She was not "finding loopholes," much less assessing risk. She simply understood, suddenly, one thing:
The safety here was not built on inviolability, but on a default assumption of goodwill.
And assumptions were the least reliable things in the world.
She thought of the grand systems they taught in class—museum ethics, public responsibility, the protection of cultural heritage. Those words were solemn and correct in daylight, but in a storeroom like this, they felt strangely weightless.
She suddenly understood why so many problems were not "broken through," but "overlooked."
No one suspects a figure who appears every day.
No one rechecks a workflow that has seemed to run for years.
No one wants to admit that the system they rely on is, in truth, only barely standing.
The awareness brought her, for the first time, a kind of chill—especially when she kept seeing similar incidents in news reports and professional books.
But what did it have to do with her, really?
She was only a tiny intern.