museum of love

"where do lovers go when the love is gone?"

In my inbox sits an email from someone who shares their name with a past love. It stares at me. Bright blue, piercing. I beg the mail gods to shower a few emails and bury it. Out of sight, out of mind. The truth, however, is that I never stopped thinking of him, perhaps I never will. How could I? Afterall, there are burnt embers, ashy remnants of what was that have travelled with me through years and continents. Somewhere, in the farthest corner of my heart is an obituary inscribed with ‘gone, but never forgotten’.

A few months into moving here, his name began to swirl and slosh around in my brain. It was relentless and fervent. For years of our life, my sister and I shrunk ourselves into the corners of our house, hugging and bawling through what felt like a vortex of grief we’d never escape. We gritted our teeth and willed ourselves to make it to another day. Through the endless levels of this game of survival of the fittest I had friends who cheered me on from the sidelines. I owe my survival to them, even if the sidelines are bereft of them now. Bereft of him.

As a young adult, I imagined love to be persevering, everlasting. Now, in my late twenties, I know love to be persevering yet ephemeral. I tiptoe around it optimistically, one eye clocked in on the fire exit. Love storms in and storms out with just as much ease. He and I, we wished each other goodnight one day, not knowing that there wouldn’t be another. For days after, I bled tears onto histopathological diagrams at the library and viciously knocked on the internet’s invisible wall. All I wanted was for the mountains beyond his window to sing to us at night once more, watch it drape itself in a woolly cloak, like the clouds that brushed past its peak. I wanted to watch it robe and derobe itself, again and again and again, for years to come.

The trouble with you humans is that you are so
concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged
open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the
waves. You’re not a boat, you can go under and come
up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard
kicking legs.

And your heart, she said, that gargantuan ark, that
floating hotel. Call it Unsinkable, though it is sinkable.
Embark, embark.

There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with
everyone you’ll ever love.

That’s what the Titanic told me this morning, me, lying next to her on the ocean floor.

There are enough ballrooms in you.

- On This the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic, We Reconsider the Buoyancy of the Human Heart, Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie

For years now, I have uttered the last line of this poem like a sacred prayer.

There are enough ballrooms in me. There are enough ballrooms in me.

In one of my most favourite columns ever, Sarah Kay writes -

You know that your heart has an iceberg with your name on it. You are trying to carry all of the joy and gratitude, while grief and loss come hurtling toward you.

- Poetry Rx: There Are Enough Ballrooms in You

I betray all my anatomical knowledge and sensibilities to think of my heart as an organ that isn’t four chambered but ever expanding. Every new love carves a new chamber for itself. My heart is an iceberg and I dance in all its ballrooms - sometimes to a symphony, sometimes to the click of my own lone heels.

In the aftermath of loss, many doors remain to be shut. We draw up invisible, seemingly cruel walls on the internet. Instagram, Twitter, Discord and the many selves we scatter across the real estate of the interweb. Some tunnels, however, for better or for worse, remain patent. Goodreads tells me he was last seen two whole years ago. I wonder how much dust he has been feeding his bookshelf and Kindle. Why? I wonder. Each time I use my Kindle, I owe him a little gratitude for teaching this technologically ill-equipped human how to do so. His account is still the only one authorised to send me books on that little device - a relic of the past from when I’d find books on it as a mid-day surprise. At the bottom of my virtual library lies the first of The Wheel of Time series that I never got around to reading - fantasy isn’t for me but he was a hopeful man.

When love leaves, one is left with other big questions like what happens to the architecture of this shared universe now reduced to memorabilia. I, for one, couldn’t bear the thought of parting with any of it. Time pushed the physical reminders to the edges of my life but I liked knowing that it was still in my life. I rarely went back to it but for three years, I let it be right there. I needed myself, and everyone that entered my abode, to know that he was once here. The walls were only stripped bare when I changed phones thrice in the span of a few months last year. In a frustrating battle with cloud storage and backups, I lost everything - contacts, years of text threads, photos. I framed this experience as a lesson in letting go. Everything comes and everything goes from the physical realm. Some things are best left as memories alone. Like the photos of the mountain beyond his windows, or his beautiful handwritten notes on hand infections, or how we had our own spin on good morning wishes. I haven’t uttered good morning the same way to anybody ever again. I wonder if he has, if he remembers any of this at all. Maybe these memories are mine alone to bear. I loved him. I wonder if he ever did.

I’ve had my fair share of heartbreaks in life but this one sticks out as the one that turned me inside out. There was life before him and then there was the one after. In the before, my heart shrivelled in fear of people leaving, my knees bruised from begging them to stay. In the after, I left before they did and I haven’t bruised my knees since. I left the friend who began choosing her partner over our friendship, just the way he did - an embarassing detail I’m putting on paper for the first time. Then there was the friend of two years who ghosted me. Deep down, I saw it coming and I wish I’d left before they had the chance to. I let them all go with such ease, like sand slipping through my fingers. In this after, I love with caution. I imagine being stoic at funerals. Everything comes and everything goes from the physical realm and I will always be okay. There will always be more and more ballrooms in my heart.

In the solitude of my room and this foreign life now, I find the empty ballrooms of my heart flooding with grief. These days I find my eyes aching so often and so easily. The icebergs of past loves pierce me early in the morning and late at night. I grieve for all that was. I grieve for the loves I never got to love enough. And then I thank the gods above, as hard as an atheist can, for the chance to have ever loved anyone at all. I hope that this beating heart of mine was loved too.

Now, as doctors do, I have diagnosed this affliction of mine. I can pinpoint its etiology, the precipitating event. It started with telling my therapist that I thought a lot about somehow telling him that for what it’s worth, his love and our friendship saved me for as long as it did. I wanted all my past loves to know that if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have made it out alive of the life I have now left behind. I considered burning this urge, even if I believed that too many years had passed for me to want to hear from them at all. After all, I was healed. Then my therapist said that I should send them that text, send my gratitude out into their universe. And so I did a little healthy stalking to find him. I saw that he still followed me from a dead account of his. Then I saw that his boys trip made it out of the group chat to Goa. I saw that I still remembered his friends. We used to joke about me recognising his friends from their silhouettes. Turns out I still did. What use was any of this now? And so, after all these years, I flung a text at the internet’s invisible wall once again. I knew it to be impenetrable.

Then he replied.

My heart skipped several beats when the notification popped up and then I watched the chasm between us crack open once again. The internet’s invisible wall had been torn down and now my mind flooded with everything I wanted to say with such shocking veracity.

Are you okay? What specialty did you decide to spend your life with? Are you staying here or chasing greener pastures elsewhere? Did you take a year off like you wanted to? Did it ease your exhaustion? Do you still love her? I love you. I wish we had more time. Will you come back, even if for only a moment? I wish you never left me the way you did. I’m sorry, I wish I was better too. I’m sorry. I love you.

I pondered over it for a bit. Every cell in my body twitched with want. But this time, I burned the urge. This time, I let my words simmer in it’s own pool of grief on this side of the internet.

Let the bygones be bygones.