By Katie Vasquez

I keep the volume off. Wisps of hair have come loose from my ponytail and are plastered to the base of my neck. My feet are cold — I kicked my socks off during the night and couldn't find them with my feet at the bottom of the bed and gave up searching for them. It’s nearly ten in the morning, the sun has been pouring through the closed blinds for hours, and I’ve buried myself deeper under the covers. I can’t get out of bed — I've been trying for over an hour. Who knows why? Well, I do, or at least I believe I do. I’m depressed, but it’s also more than that — I just need five more minutes. I'm incapable of facing the day, but I can watch the woman cleaning on my phone screen, keep my head down and one eye open, the other pressed into my pillow where it can continue drifting to sleep. I prop the phone on my partner's empty pillow, farther away from my face, blinking a few times. I haven’t put on my glasses and can’t focus with it too close. I watch the woman working behind the guardrail and notice how closely she stands to this monumental painting. This seeming transgression is mesmerizing, the intimacy between her and the painting, as she maintains her cleaning duty. I see it as more of a duty by the third rewatch, less of a job. Job implies she is only doing this for a paycheck. She is cleaning with a sense of duty, commitment, a responsibility to the dead artist, a steward of the past for the future — right now, it’s her duty to get me out of bed.

The woman in the Instagram video is holding a tan, long-handled brush with a wide, soft, bristled end — an elegant extension of her right arm — and the plastic head of a tubed vacuum cleaner in her left, gently hovering it beneath the brush like a shadow. She gently sweeps the painted canvas of one of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies at the Museum de' L'orange in Paris, a delicate dance sucking minuscule particles of dirt and dust from the painting's surface. She is dressed simply, although very chic, what I imagine most Parisians dress like, in a pair of wide-leg dark denim jeans and a black long-sleeved sweatshirt with dropped shoulder seams. Black is an interesting choice for dusting.

I catch myself on the first watch sinking deeper into my depression — maybe it's just the various shades of cobalt and ultramarine blue oil paint on the canvas. I'm feeling blue, typical. Perhaps it's knowing I have never seen this painting in person, and right now I feel like I will never be well enough to venture across the world and over an ocean. I usually cry when I see photos of these paintings, tears of awe at their beauty and magnitude, and pain that I can only ever see them through a small screen or printed in a book. I’ve witnessed strangers' photos of themselves staring at the paintings, their backs to me — I can’t see their faces, but I imagine a kind of ecstasy. I try to place myself within the image, to be them somehow, but more than that, I want the ease with which they move in the world. By the second watch, I’ve let that feeling go, and the cleaning woman has removed it from my mind.

After the fourth watch and a quick repost and save, I find the socks under the covers, slip them over my frozen toes, and lift the dog out of bed. I go through my morning routine, a cup of coffee and a few handfuls of granola eaten over the kitchen sink, chunks missing my mouth rattling down the drain. I read a few pages of my book and feel ready enough to start the day. I take a quick shower, wash my face, swipe on mascara and a bit of lipstick on my cheeks and lips. I put on a pair of jeans and a cardigan and then check the grocery list on the refrigerator door, typing it on my phone for tonight’s dinner. One head of curly leaf lettuce, one ripe avocado, cherry tomatoes, and a fresh bouquet of flowers. I have the day off from work and take a long way home with the single grocery bag in the passenger seat, feeling accomplished after completing a small task. At a stoplight, I glance over at the bouquet — white alstroemeria with slim pink dashed lines running up the petals — peering out at me over the top of the grocery bag. The cleaning woman comes into my head again.

I imagine her at home. Perhaps she is the opposite of her job. It is presumptuous of me to think that, since I am not a different person at work than at home, but I like to imagine she is. If the cleaning woman can be different at home, maybe another version of me will be able to see these paintings one day. She doesn’t clean her cat litter box as often as she should, leftovers sit in the fridge seeping through cardboard containers, crusted rings of mystery sauce glazed on the glass shelves, a slightly fermented although not unpleasant smell emanating from the trash can: a sweet bottle of wine and some orange peels, maybe a few fish bones from dinner the night before. She likely has piles of books around her apartment on the floor, teetering in sculptural stacks, classics mixed with contemporary works in translation, which she never reads. Stray hair, cobwebs, and cat fur mingle with lint and crumbs left from food eaten on the couch. After hours of staring at an Impressionistic mass of color and brushwork, whose clarity is barely distinguishable even from a distance, I imagine she experiences eye fatigue, like Monet, who suffered from glaucoma while working on these paintings. Does the cleaner feel a kinship with the creator? No, she is a creator, too.

She must dislike aspects of her nine-to-five. Does looking at the same painting every day, no matter how grand, become old and familiar like a marriage, an understood intimacy within the dailiness, caring for it like a home? I know the woman cleans not just this painting but many within the museum, but I want her to be monogamous — this is the only room of paintings she cleans. In the evening, I show my partner the video, tears stinging my eyes. He quirks a slight smile — a smile that says he doesn't quite understand what I see, but his eyes show appreciation for what the cleaning woman has done for me. He doesn’t pry as he picks a piece of dust off the couch cushion.