El Museo de las Relaciones Rotas

The Museum of Broken Relationships

Lost: a will to love // Found: El Museo de las Relaciones Rotas

(This series is cumulative and will make more sense if you’ve read the first one.)

Though I wanted to write back to all of them, the prompt—tell me what you’ve lost—seemed to have traced a boundary around the messages that felt difficult to cross. Maybe it was something about the imperative: tell me. On the page where those strangers had submitted their lost things, I hadn’t implied that anything would come back. Still—the shortest messages were often the most troubling.

Someone named Clément sent me a single line in June: I lost my will to love.

I had been thinking about the necessity of a will in the practice of loving someone. My will, at the time, was directed unilaterally at my friendships, which all felt as thrilling as romance, but as solid as gravity. I’d been in a few partnerships which had aspired toward permanence but were ultimately transient in comparison to all the platonic love that had remained the spine of …