I AM LIKE A MUSEUM

I am like a museum where everything is preserved. I am a living museum under the open sky. It is quite unique. I still pulse with burning passions that remind me of past losses and future victories. Life within me has already reached its halfway point, yet I am still far from the end. Far from the end of immortality.

I am like a museum whose basement is filled with the spirit of Adam and Eve. The spirit of sin and disobedience. The spirit of forgiveness, neither sought nor received. The Adam and Eve department is full of temptation and drama. I am an example of both God's anger and His love. I am Eve—an ancient measure of weakness and strength. I am a rebellion against prohibitions and rules.

I am like a museum with an archaeological hall dedicated to physical growth and the small victories of the body. In this part of the museum, my body exists in several sizes. The innocent size, when I still believed that words meant exactly what they said. Back then, I believed that freedom was our greatest right and responsibility, and that nothing could make us afraid because we were born fearless victors, not slaves. This is not the fault of the child's body, but of the world outside the museum, which is only a projection of our fears.

Then comes the body that has grown enough to discover love. A body that matures faster than the heart. When the body makes love, the heart may still remain cold because the heart develops at a different pace and in different dimensions. It does not need to touch the body to know that it loves. My body carries the memories of wounds that remain living reminders of betrayal and forgiveness. Every part of my body remembers. Every part of my body knows.

I am like a museum with special departments for every past emotion and every experience. Above the archaeological department is the historical department of feelings. You are there, among the exhibits, both in the singular and in the plural. Because you were never meant to be only one.

There is the first kiss, from which we expect the whole world to change. Yet the world remains just as unfaithful after the second kiss, and after every kiss that follows. I touch your body with my lips, but it does not move you. You touch my body with your lips, but I am somewhere far away. We search for each other and cannot find ourselves. We chase one another and still cannot reach ourselves. Yet we continue believing that next time everything will be different because we keep searching for ourselves in another person instead of within our own hearts.

That is why the historical department of feelings has broken windows. We expect so much from one another that disappointment shatters the glass into countless pieces. Then we continue walking barefoot through life, with tiny shards of glass buried in our feet. They bleed, and we carry the pain of old disappointments wherever we go. We return again and again to the same vicious circle, hoping for change, yet instead of removing the splinters, we push them even deeper until they reach the heart.

Here are all my missed springs, hot summers and golden autumns. And the cold of long winters still stirs my heart.

The historical department is filled with an enormous amount of tenderness that I have kept for you in a huge old clay pot. Sometimes I have to open its door because the tenderness I never managed to give you creates such unbearable tension that I can no longer endure the feelings of guilt and self-pity. Then the tenderness leaves the historical department and climbs to the top floor, where my dreams live.

I am like a museum whose top floor houses the department of future plans—a kind of gallery of the future. This is where dreams are kept. We pursue the same dreams: freedom and love, the courage to take the first step, the pride to return when returning is necessary. Here are all my longings and my dreams of meaning. Here too are future pain, future betrayal and future darkness, waiting to multiply themselves once again.

So my museum of the body, in every new life, goes through the same endless circle of lonely mistakes and dreams. And you—you are always both singular and plural.

A staircase of sunbeams descends above my museum of the body, inviting me towards salvation.

Tomorrow is utopia. Today is revenge.

(Elena S. Lyubenova)