I am your public museum.
I have stored, housed, and displayed your quirks and moods that go from amber sunrises to grey sunsets. There are open shelves and closed glass cupboards with little delicate stories you told me. I have cleaned them with a dusting cloth and laminated them with a thin plastic film so that the edges of the stories do not fall off and get mixed with other stories and create a new line of fiction — just like our lives, a haphazard mix of stolen stories that at the end makes no sense.
When you enter the museum you see a large wooden console table where I have displayed the exterior of you. Your receding brown hair that’s straight at the roots but turns curly at the ends, your fingers lined with paper cuts, the inverted smile, eyes that look drunk and dead at the same time, the striped shirts that are never quite your size, fake Onitsukas and Birkenstocks bought at a Bangkok flea market, the nose that is held up high — I had to put it up on a small stool so that it can look down upon everyone walking by.
To the right of the console table, there is a big white wall which I have used to display many of your dreams and fantasies. A small section is dedicated to all your delusions painted in bright reds and magentas. Visitors often tell me that’s the first thing they notice — blood-red delusions. All your dreams are colored yellow and orange they are so far-fetched and unreal that they seem almost possible, like watching a sunset from a boat on a calm sea and you feel you can walk straight into the sun. One day you will hug the sun maybe; who knows? Your dreams keep my museum warm.
A little ahead of the big wall is the cabinet of things you like. This took me the longest to curate. They keep changing. By the time I display a ‘like,’ you move it to ‘dislike’. I kept the cabinet empty for a long time hoping that something would eventually stick. For now, I have a few old songs, cities you want to visit, your mom’s spicy Sunday roast, a few bottles of whiskey, my pestering questions, our lunch dates, local train rides, and greasy Chinese food. There are still a lot of empty shelves that I need to fill. I want this to be the section that visitors spend the most time.
There is also a “things I do not like” cabinet. But I do not want to highlight it much. It's a small glass cabinet with no spotlight over it. Sometimes I pray that visitors completely miss to notice it or the light above it breaks. I am scared of what you will see inside it. Things miraculously and mysteriously keep moving between the ‘like’ and the ‘dislike’ cabinets. Locks do not seem to work either.
That’s the thing about being in love. Whether you like it or not you end up becoming a museum — a work-in-progress museum.
