The Museum of Maybes

There is a place inside me where I seldom invite visitors. It is silent there... in a way that is not restful, but rather preservation. The air bends thick with what could have been said, what could have been felt, or what should have been. The walls are made not from rock, but from hesitation. Asking for a floor is too much, so let’s just say there is a floor: memory. It is cracked in places and a little too polished in many aspects. And in a central spot, there is a bronze plaque we all prominently display at funerals that reads: “Here lies all that almost became.”  

I have strolled its hallways innumerable times, and yet I feel like I am stepping back inside for the first time every time I enter. All of the hallways meet in a room of everything that might have been: a version of me that said yes when the polite thing to do was to nod; a version of me that stayed when there were loudly grown missing pieces and darned parents prompting me to run; a version of me that believed I was worth it.  

They say time heals everything, but I prefer to think that time provides ghostly excuses. And in this museum, these ghosts still breathe. The woman that I always thought I would have as mine, the elegance of my dawn, leans against the window there. She never grows older. Sometimes she gazes at me not with contempt but with a sort of age-worn compassion; her voice is gentle, almost like she might be mumbling, “That’s okay. I could understand how you couldn’t become me.” 

There are maybes in glass cases here too— conversations I rehearsed but never said, letters I never sent, hands I never held, love that brushed my shoulders like wind, asking to be seen. 

And I didn’t. Because I was late to my own heart. Because in each instance of my life asking me to choose, I chose safety clothed as sacrifice, and regret dressed as maturity. 

They say there is beauty in restraint. But what I wonder is—does it count as strength if no one is asking you to be strong? Or is it just another way of me saying that I didn’t deserve softness? 

This museum has an exhibition called “Rooms I Once Lived In”, you will see items: a bed that recalls the weight of unslept sorrows, a chair that holds the shadows of solitude, a mirror I stood before searching for someone I knew. 

You will see that the lighting in here is gentle. Not because I am hiding anything. But because some truths only exist in the half-light, like how we endure ourselves, or how sometimes endurance is the loneliest form of triumph. 

There are no tour guides here. No placards describing the exhibits. Just silence, limited only by the occasional flutter of what still hurts. The museum is not open to the public. But you are here. And you may already know this place. 

You see, I didn't write this to be understood. I wrote this because there lives in all of us somewhere a soft echo of the life we almost lived, and if we do not find it a voice, it carves itself into us anyway. 

We call it nostalgia. We call it yearning. We call it heartbreak, when really it is just the self remembering its lineage of itself never born.  

So I keep this museum alive. Not for obsession, but for reverence. All of the maybes deserve a place to lie. All of the unchosen lives deserve a sigh. 

And maybe--just maybe-- that is what it is to be human. Not to become everything we hoped to be, but to carry the burden of the not-become with a little grace. 

So if you visit me and find me quiet, distant, not quite all there— 

Please know I am elsewhere. 

Tending to rooms you may never see. 

Dusting memories. Naming ghosts. 

Keeping company with the self I almost became. 

Yours, 

From behind the glass of maybe, 

—A Curator of Could-Have-Beens