Twelve Steps for Comprehending Infinity
Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Room
1. Meet a girl and fall in love.
2. Blow your salary each month on hotels and dinners you can’t afford in various European cities.
3. Get married and move to another part of town / another city / another country (delete as appropriate).
4. Spend so long trying for a baby, you start to look at couples with kids like they're aliens or gods.
5. Conceive, gestate and deliver your first child in an agony of blood tests, waiting and many, many visits to the toilet.
6. Fall in love all over again.
7. When you’re sure you could never be more fulfilled or less well-slept, discover you’ll be a parent again.
8. Meet your second child and – despite the fear, the sleep deprivation and the poverty – fall in love for a third time.
9. While your wife breastfeeds your daughter to sleep, go and comfort your son, who has woken up.
10. Hold his little hand in yours, as he insists, and place the other hand on his golden brow till his eyes close.
11. Look at him sleeping beautifully with his sleepy old lion under one arm, your hand still clasped in his.
12. Realise you will never ever grow tired of telling them all how very much you love them; suns might cool to rock and space fold in on itself, but you would still need to say it one more time.
