The Mona Lisa and Me · BUTTERFLIES IN THE STORM

The Mona Lisa and Me

I have visited Paris several times over the years, and for the longest time I carried a small, almost ridiculous confession: I had never seen the Mona Lisa.

It was not for lack of opportunity. Each visit placed me within reach of the Louvre Museum, that enormous cathedral of art where she has sat quietly for centuries.

But there were always stories.

The long wait.

The crowds.

The chaotic sea of raised phones.

People warned that the experience was anticlimactic. The painting was smaller than expected. Hidden behind glass. Surrounded by noise.

And then there were the stranger accounts.

Some said the painting spoke to them.

Others said they felt something shift inside them the moment they stood before her. People described tears, applause, even fainting.

It sounded less like viewing a painting and more like approaching a shrine.

So for years I postponed the encounter, half curious, half skeptical.

Until one day curiosity won and I followed a friend into the museum.

The walk through the Louvre feels almost ceremonial. Room after room, masterpiece after masterpiece, until eventually the crowd begins to thicken, as if pulled by gravity toward one small frame that has somehow captured the world’s imagination.

And there she was.

Not overwhelming.

Not dramatic.

Just a woman sitting quietly, painted more than five hundred years ago by Leonardo da Vinci.

What struck me most was not her famous smile.

It was the restraint.

In a world that constantly demands explanation, declaration, confession, she offers none of it.

She does not perform emotion for the viewer.

She does not reveal herself.

She simply looks back.

And the world has spent centuries trying to finish the sentence she never started.

Standing there, I realized something unexpected.

She felt familiar.

She reminded me of a certain kind of woman.

The woman who has seen too much of life to waste words explaining it.

The woman who carries entire histories behind her eyes.

In many African storytelling communities, elders sometimes say that a person’s eyes reveal what the mouth refuses to say.

You may have heard the expression:

anya na-ekwu okwu

—the eyes are speaking.

That is exactly the experience many people describe when they finally stand before the Mona Lisa.

Her eyes seem to follow you around the room.

Not in a confrontational way, but with a quiet, patient observation.

In Igbo land where I come from, we are taught to recognize presence.

When you stand before something that carries weight beyond explanation, you acknowledge it quietly.

You pay homage.

You lower your head.

Sometimes you bow slightly before you leave.

Not out of worship.

But out of recognition.

So before I turned to follow the slow current of visitors out of the room, I paused for a moment and gave the faintest bow.

Not to the painting.

But to the silence she had held for five hundred years.

The Mona Lisa is not fascinating because she reveals something.

She is fascinating because she refuses to.

We live in an age where everyone is explaining themselves constantly. Online, in interviews, in endless streams of commentary about who we are, what we feel, why we did what we did.

But she sits there unmoved by all of that urgency.

She offers only presence.

A face that acknowledges the viewer but does not surrender its interior life.

And perhaps that is what unsettles people.

Not the smile.

But the boundary.

The quiet insistence that some parts of a person remain theirs alone.

Looking at her, I thought about how rare that has become.

The ability to exist without narrating yourself to the world.

To hold something back.

To let silence carry meaning.

And suddenly the painting felt less like an artifact from the Renaissance and more like a quiet rebellion against the age we live in.