The Museum of Lost Love. Gary Barker

been in touch with her?”

      He turned away from her.

      “No, no, of course not. I had no way to find her and I didn’t even think she remembered. That was such a long time ago. I …”

      Katia reached out gently with both of her hands to hold Goran’s arm: “You made her feel safe …”

      Goran pulled his arm away and stared at her.

      “It was more than that. It was the middle of a fucking war. People were doing anything to get out. You don’t know what that was like. We knew what they were doing to women and girls. Her family didn’t get out.”

      “No, I guess I don’t understand. I didn’t live through the war.”

      “No, you didn’t.”

      “Take your time, Goran. I’ll wait for you in the café.”

      His look told her he was relieved to have a moment to himself. She walked out the exit and entered the lobby.

      From across the small gift shop, Katia watched other visitors coming into the museum. In the gift shop she glanced at the various objects for sale, all with designs featuring broken hearts and fractured lines. After another group of visitors entered and paid, Katia felt the woman who sold tickets looking at her. Whether here or back in the US, she was used to such stares.

      “You have beautiful hair,” the woman said in slightly accented English.

      “Thank you,” Katia replied.

      She gave a quick, false smile to the woman, looked down, and then walked to the museum café and sat at a table in one corner. The waiter, a young man dressed in black pants and a black T-shirt, offered her a menu, and took her order.

      While she waited for her coffee, Katia ran her finger around each of the buttons of her sweater, starting at the top and working down and then back up. She ordered a second double espresso. Although her back was toward the exit of the exhibition space, she could sense Goran walking toward her. She felt his hesitation. He knew that Katia wanted to know more about the girl in the camp. But even more, that she wanted to know why he had reacted that way.

      ◆ ◆ ◆

      As Katia finished typing up her notes from her session with Tyler, she looked at her mobile phone. No missed calls, no texts.

      With each day away from Goran she was learning this: the normal state of lovers, of couples, is not together. Together is a transient state. The normal state of things is as much about ending and leaving as it is about beginning and staying. The normal state of love is living with the possibility that everything can, at a moment’s notice, come tumbling down. We impossibly walk for some amount of time in the same pages, in the same narrative, and we deny with every breath the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that the arc of the story bends toward being alone.

      Every city, Katia thought, every village, every neighborhood, should have a museum like the one Goran had taken her to visit more than a year ago. Children should be given classes in how to break up and move on. How to mourn the sudden loss of all-encompassing love or the end of an intense, fleeting affair and carry on with dignity. How to let someone get that close, know you that way, and let them go, taking with them your secret words and bedroom stories and those private little cries and tremors. How to walk into the story with kindness, and walk out of it without drawing blood.

      Sometimes, when Katia found herself missing Goran and wondering what might be next, she looked at her phone and scrolled through the pictures she had taken of the letters and objects in the museum. Someday, she thought, she might submit one.

      -

      MUSEUM SUBMISSION 23-2006

      We met at a tattoo parlor in the Village. We were there with mutual friends. The deal was that we were all going to get one. He could see I wasn’t sure. He whispered in my ear, asking if I wanted to make a run for it. He texted an excuse to our friends that I wasn’t feeling well. Once we were outside he grinned at me like he was five-year-old boy.

      We stayed up all night just talking. How many guys really say what they feel? And then there was how he reacted when he saw my left hand. I was born with just four fingers on that hand. It’s always curious to see how people react. I like to watch them squirm when I catch them counting a second time. Not him though. He just held my hand and said that he always thought nine was a much more interesting number than ten. His mother was a pediatrician so he even almost knew the proper name of my condition: Symbrachydactyly.

      He called a few weeks later and said that he had broken up with his girlfriend and that he wanted to see me. I told him we should give it some time. He said that it had already been some time since we met at the tattoo parlor and that he had been thinking about me ever since.

      We met at a coffee shop near my dorm. From then on it was like every moment between classes, we just wanted to be together. It was two months later that he said he loved me and I said it back, which is not a thing I do, ever.

      We started doing things couples do together. He met my father, who took us out to dinner when he passed through the city. We hung out with each other’s friends. But I never met his parents.

      Three months later he went to a journalism seminar at Kent State with two other classmates. They rented a car and on the way back they were hit by a truck that had jumped the median.

      I totally lost it. I cried for days.

      I didn’t get an announcement about the funeral. His roommate told me when it was and we took a train together to Philadelphia. After the ceremony there was a gathering at his parents’ house. I didn’t want to go, since I wasn’t invited, but his roommate insisted.

      His parents asked me how I knew their son. Before I answered, his mother reached out to hold my hands. She could see my sorrow, or see something, I think. As she held my hands, she looked at my left one for a few seconds. But I don’t think she figured it out.

      I told her I was their son’s girlfriend and they both looked at each other awkwardly. Just then, a young woman came over to us. I recognized her. It was his previous girlfriend, the one he had broken up with to be with me.

      His ex went up to them and they hugged her. She and I made eye contact and I just nodded and walked away while the three of them hugged and cried.

      I started to leave the house but then I snuck upstairs and found his room. I saw the young him. I imagined we might have slept together in his teenage bed. I took this, this trophy, from a high school tennis tournament, and I put it in my purse.

      If his parents ever come to the museum and say it’s theirs, you should give it to them. They knew him longer. Their tears weigh more than mine. Although I do think that waking up with him next to me and hearing him say he loved me means something. That gives me some rights, doesn’t it? Even if they don’t know who I am. Even if his mother didn’t notice how many fingers I have.

      New York City, USA, 2006

      -

      Tyler

      Tyler looked at the sleeping boys next to him. One shared his sandy blond hair, crinkly eyes, and surfer-boy softness. The other had wavy dark hair and dark eyes that reminded Tyler of the boy’s mother. When they were awake, it was all he could do to keep up with them. When they slept, he tried to pull himself together.

      Where the Wild Things Are was open at the foot of Tyler’s bed. There were two matchbox cars on his nightstand. Sammy had wanted Tyler to read the story, while Joaquin had insisted on driving the matchbox cars over Tyler’s bed. Joaquin had pretended not to listen to the story but Tyler could tell that he had been fascinated by it. Before Tyler reached the last page, both boys were yawning. Tyler let them fall asleep in his bed, and then he took them one by one to their beds in the room they shared.

      Before the boys came to live with him, Tyler had never felt time shift so acutely. This was the only