MY HEART IS A MUSEUM

A quiet walk through the rooms we build from memory, love, and everything in between.

The other day, on a random Tuesday afternoon, I logged into Facebook, yes, that ancient relic from another life. I hadn’t touched it in years, but something about the day made me nostalgic (as usual). So I did what any seasoned memory hoarder would: I headed straight to the “On This Day” section.

I scrolled past the usual suspects, cringeworthy status updates typed lyk dis, pixelated photos with bad filters, friendships that feel like old jeans I don’t fit into anymore, and then I found it. A post from 14 years ago. Just sitting there. Waiting.

It was from a friend of mine. There were about eight or nine of us sprawled across her house in Vikaspuri, in that lived-in West Delhi way, cushions on the floor, a fan too slow to matter, and laughter that kept spilling into the next room. It was the day before she left for Mumbai for her undergrad. Today, she lives in that same city, now with a husband and her beautiful newborn daughter.

It was like visiting the memory in a museum. The heart is a museum. Tucked between the shelves of old crushes, fights that felt bigger than they were, and the evenings we thought would last forever, this moment stood quietly in its glass case. Not grand, not dramatic. Just full of life.

That’s the thing about the heart. It collects. Not just people, but versions of them. Not just moments, but the feeling of the moment. Like a curator with no training but too much sentimentality, it hoards the soft, the silly, the half-forgotten.

There was another person in that photo. Someone I would come to love with all my being, but hadn’t started to yet. At that point, in that dimly lit room, we were just friends. Everyone was laughing, talking over each other, passing chips in between gulps of Limca. But she stood out, not in a dramatic, movie-scene way, just in that quietly magnetic way some people do when they’re about to become important.

For the next five years, she would become my world. I saw her nearly every day, at her house, at mine, for walks, outside juice stalls, inside silences I didn’t know how to fill. I loved her with the kind of intensity that’s only possible when you're young and convinced that love alone can fix anything.

But love, as it turns out, is not always enough.

After more than a decade of knowing her, first as a friend, then as the centre of everything, we drifted. Not suddenly, but in small, irreversible ways. Today, she lives in another country. She’s happily married. We’re barely in touch. And still, when I see that photo, it’s her face I find first.

Another room in the museum. Dimly lit. A little dusty. I don’t go there often. But when I do, I sit very quietly.

Further down the corridor, I realise that the museum isn’t chronological. It isn’t even logical. Memories don’t line up neatly like framed paintings. They’re scattered, moody, curated by emotion more than time.

I walk into a room I didn’t know existed, a small one, with warm yellow light and a familiar bed that somehow smells like growing up.

We had just dropped my sister to another city for her chef training. She was going to be gone for at least three years. On the surface, I was thrilled. I was 15. The house was now mine between 9 and 6. The TV remote was finally mine. The computer, mine. The fridge, mine. The silence, mine.

We fought a lot anyway. She teased me endlessly. There was supposed to be relief in her absence. And yet. That first night, when we got home and I trudged to my room, the silence felt off. My bed, too wide. The room, too still. There was no one to shout at me to go brush my teeth. No one to tuck me in like she did every night, out of habit more than affection. Even at 15. Especially at 15.

So I coped the only way I knew. I placed an extra blanket beside me. Not for warmth. Just for presence. I don’t think anyone ever knew. But in the museum, the blanket is there, neatly folded, forever waiting.

Then, a few rooms closer to the entry, brighter, less dusty, there exists a memory that’s oddly clear. A 21-year-old me, half-boy, half-hopeful, excitedly swiping on Tinder. Getting that strange little dopamine rush that never quite gets old, a match. A match means someone, somewhere, liked how I looked. Someone read the badly crafted one-liner in my bio and thought, okay, this one might be funny.

One of them challenged me. She claimed she knew Delhi better than I did, and not quietly either. A full-blown debate followed, which chhole bhature joint reigned supreme, whether Dilli Haat was overrated, and why Kamla Nagar had better street food than SDA.

It started as a joke. But it turned into a friendship, one of those rare ones that feels instantly familiar, like it existed before the match, before the app, before the 21-year-old version of me even knew what he was looking for.

She became my constant. First my closest friend. At 27, my girlfriend. At 31, a whole decade later, my wife.

Not every exhibit in the museum is tinged with longing. Some glow. Not with the sharp light of nostalgia, but with something gentler, like the hallway light you always leave on for someone coming home.

Some rooms are still lived in. You can tell by the warmth in the walls, the slightly askew photo frames, the laughter that hasn’t settled into silence yet. This one is for the friendships that stayed.

In this room, nothing is frozen in glass. This room smells like home because it was built by people who chose to stay.

Too fluid to cage, too present to preserve. These memories are still being blissfully added to. I don’t visit this room alone. I arrive with the people I created it with, teleported straight from dinner tables cluttered with food, alcohol, and laughing faces. Together, we take group excursions through the museum, pausing to point at half-framed chaos: the time we missed a flight and had no money to buy another ticket, the all-nighters before college exams powered by Maggi and blind hope, the night one of us got hilariously turned down by a girl at the bar and somehow made it worse by trying again. The room changes every time we come back. New corners get built, old ones are repainted, and nothing ever quite stays still. This room doesn’t need captions. It just needs company.

There is a room where my parents exist in motion. Still alive, still calling, still asking if I’ve eaten, still scolding me for forgetting a chore, being young and irresponsible despite my age. And yet, I walk into this room with an odd kind of tenderness because I know, one day, I will walk in and it would be the only place I could visit them. There are memories here that feel like heirlooms in motion. My father telling us stories while putting us to bed. My mother folding clothes while narrating a moral, always mid-chore but never too busy to worry. Nothing dramatic ever happened in this room. But it carries the weight of everything that made me feel safe. I don’t know how to prepare for the day when this room becomes sealed behind glass. So for now, I visit it often. I let it remind me to call them back. To pay attention. To stay a little longer before I say goodbye.

The museum of the heart is always open, even when we’re not looking. We carry it with us, in old songs, in screenshots we can’t delete, in phone numbers we still remember but no longer dial. Some rooms are behind glass, untouched. Others are messy, still in progress. Some we visit often. Others we avoid until a smell, a date, or a stray message pulls us back in. There’s no map. No order. Just traces of who we were, who we loved, and who we’re still becoming. And if we’re lucky, we keep building new rooms, with the people who stayed, the selves we’re still meeting, and the quiet, ordinary days that one day, without warning, turn sacred.