The Museum of Lost Connections

I am the curator of the museum of lost connections.

I walk through this museum. I watch over it.

The light shone through the windows placed at strategic locations throughout the hall in which the curator walked. The museum was an architectural masterpiece. With minimum of artificial lighting it managed to illuminate the entirety of its vastness with the aid of the natural counterpart. This is what all homes strive for. To be part of the outside. To bring the outside to the inside without all its tedium. In the morning the halls of the museum were as brightly lit as the outside to which the curator has not ventured in many years.

‘Give me that’

A woman’s voice; not loud not echoing but soft. Permeating everywhere.

The curator turns to look behind him.

A man is running and laughing, he has something in his hands. A woman runs after him laughing yet with an expression of happy annoyance on her face. He stops and holds his clenched fist with the shadowy object aloft, high in the air. It is out of the reach of the woman. She tries to hold on to him and jump to get at the thing he is denying her. He allows her this transgression with an expression of amusement. Suddenly he brings his arms down and hugs her close to him. He looks into her eyes and she looks back momentarily forgetting his childishness. She closes her eyes,  brings her lips to his and they kiss.

The curator sees all this and wonders whose they are. He wonders how they had lost all that they had, all their tenuous yet throbbing life connections. He walks on. He has seen many in his time here.

A ball bounces across the doorway to the next hall and a child laughing runs after it. It stops near a chair. A man sits on it weeping. The child oblivious to the man picks up the ball and runs back to his mother who is waving at him to come over form the other side of the room. A hand rests on the man’s shoulders, another man materializes beside him. The crying man’s shoulders are squeezed briefly. He looks up at the man standing beside him and smiles through the grief.

They are not there. The curator knows that these are merely ethereal products of connections long disappeared. He walks on.

The museum existed as a set of vast interconnected halls brightly lit with high ceilings and red carpet walkways. In all that vastness though there was some finiteness. A small room set aside inconspicuously from the hall where the curator slept and still sleeps.

The museum had no exhibits, just empty halls. The exhibits of the museum were ethereal. It was for incorporeal strings that the museum stood for. They were everywhere and nowhere.  Not a soul walked through the museum except the curator. It was like the world, it was the world.

Once the world was filled with people that made these connections; they walked and talked and sang and danced and loved and played and more importantly… lived.

But as generation after generations of humans came into existence some found it hard to answer the question of their lives.

Been taught to live for the future than for the present, they developed a nostalgia for the past that left them unrooted. In this great confusion that swept through the hordes of humanity, many took their lives as they felt misplaced and alone. But they could not have fathomed the consequences of their decision.

People related to them, who loved these takers of their own lives, felt the effect of the passing away as well. They realized that when the myriad of people who held the other line of the string of connections died, be it brother, sister, husband, wife, son, lover, father, friend or anyone, they took something away with them, to whatever lies beyond this firmament. They through their connections with the living had taken a part of the living person’s soul. A gaping hole that could not be filled.

The living realized that they had to go after the dead to feel alive again, a contradiction but nonetheless a dictum. And so people started following their loved ones in a chain that started to stretch on and on.

Finally now only one man was left. The curator.

He sat on one of the few benches that adorned the hallways at regular intervals. He sat there and stared at the high window opposite him. The light was waning. It was already dusk.

‘Where am I?’

‘Here’ the curator replies and turns to look at the women beside him. She is thin and fragile. Her face is wrinkled a bit yet serenely beautiful in the twilight glow.

‘What time is it?

‘It’s now dear’

‘I miss you.’

He raises his arms and caresses her cheeks.

‘I miss you too.’

‘When will you come?’

He just looks at her, his eyes moist with tears.

He gets up and walks back to his inconspicuous room. He will see her. The day is not far away. He is lonely…….. beyond words.

I am the curator of the museum of lost connections.

I walk through this museum. I watch over it.

I watch over it for………..

-Rohith