The painting, The Absinthe Drinker, has always mystified me as a little girl. A reproduction of it hangs on my aunt’s otherwise bare white wall in her cramped living room in Elmhurst, Queens. A woman sits alone in the corner of a tavern, lost in thought. I would always wonder why she looked so sad, because my age and my innocence had yet so far prevented me from truly knowing the tragedy of life that some felt. Her age is undeterminable, but she is probably old enough to have experienced life’s trials and tribulations. She is accompanied by on