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Some losses do not leave.
They collect themselves into rooms, hang themselves on walls, and wait for you to walk in and recognise them.
There is a museum in Zagreb, Croatia, called the Museum of Broken Relationships. Tourists line up for it. Critics have praised it.
It has toured the world—Berlin, Los Angeles, Tokyo—carrying suitcases of love gone wrong, letters never sent, a wedding dress worn once and then folded into a box, a wind-up toy that one half of a couple played with every morning until the morning they didn’t.
People donate their ruins willingly. They press their grief into display cases and walk away lighter.
When I first heard of this place, I laughed—the polite, uncomfortable laugh of someone who has recognised themselves in a stranger’s story. Until I heard Andrea Gibson’s poem, “The Museum of Broken Relationships.” God, that piece tore me up. I thought: who would pay to walk through other people’s heartbreak?
Then I thought: I would. I already do. I have been doing it my entire life.
We all carry one. A museum of broken love assembled without intention, curated without consent. The exhibits accumulate quietly—a text message you should not have sent, a silence that lasted three weeks longer than it needed to, the exact way a person’s face changed when you finally said the thing you had been afraid to say. You do not choose the collection. The collection chooses you.
Room One: Things That Were Never Named
The first room in my museum has no labels on the walls. This is appropriate, because the loves it houses never had names either. They were the feelings that existed in the space between friendship and something more—a country without a flag, without borders you could point to on a map and say: here, this is where we lived.
There was a girl I knew in secondary school. We spoke and spent time during our school days. We talked about everything except the thing that sat between us like an uninvited guest at a meal—politely ignored, quietly eating.
One day, we both left high school and as it happens to most of us, roads lead to different directions. I remember I never saw her again until recently. The talks ended. Neither of us said anything about it. What was there to say? Nothing had happened. Nothing official. Nothing that could be grieved properly.
But grief does not require paperwork. It does not ask for proof of relationship before it sits down in your chest and makes itself at home. The unnamed loves leave the same marks as the named ones. Sometimes deeper, because you never even got to claim them.
In this room, I keep: a song we both liked that I still skip when it comes on. A joke that only she would have understood. The particular light of late afternoons on dusty Nairobi roads. A colour I have not seen anywhere else in the world.
Room Two: What We Did Instead of Apologising
Here I am reminded of the man I have become—buying things when I did not know how to speak. After a fight, a silence, a wrong turn taken and never corrected, just silence, a trait I believe I inherited from my birth giver. My mom was never much of a talker, but she would do things straight from the heart. Giving became a remedy, I suppose. She would give something or appear with something, a new pair of shoes or a memorable item, and would watch over it before acknowledging what it meant.
I have inherited this. Not gifts, but the gesture in place of the word. The cup of tea left silently on a desk. The errand run without being asked. The way I will rearrange an entire afternoon to be present for someone I have hurt, rather than simply saying: I am sorry, I was wrong, I did not mean it the way it landed.
This room in my museum is full of substitutes. It smells of effort. It is tidy because people who cannot apologise are often excellent at other things. The exhibits here are impressive. But none of them are what was actually needed.
Room Three: The Long Ones
Some loves do not end dramatically. There is no scene, no door slammed, no moment you can point to later and say: that was it—that was when it broke. Instead they diminish. They thin, like broth cooked too long, until one day you look into the pot and realise there is nothing left but water and the ghost of something that once had substance.
The third room holds those. The relationships that ended through a long, slow exhalation rather than a rupture. A friendship that survived everything except geography, and then didn’t. A love that was real—genuinely, verifiably real—but required two people to keep choosing it. Then one of them stopped, and then the other one did too, because you cannot hold something aloft alone forever. Your arms get tired.
The long ones are the hardest to exhibit, because they have no single object that contains them. They are more like climate than weather. You cannot put a season in a glass case. You cannot hang duration on a wall. And yet they are there, in the museum, present in the quality of the air, in the particular heaviness that settles on you on certain Sunday evenings when the light goes and you remember, without quite remembering what.
The Gift Exhibit
Zagreb’s museum has a gift shop. You can buy postcards of other people’s objects, small replicas of exhibit items, like a mug that reads: It’s a long story. I find this marvelous. The commodification of heartbreak is, at least, honest—because heartbreak has always been currency.
We spend it. We invest it. We hope for returns.
In my own museum, the gift shop is internal. What I give away from it—what the losses have made me capable of giving—is a particular kind of attention. The habit of noticing small things. A low tolerance for cruelty and a high tolerance for the honest mess of people trying and failing. The ability to sit with someone in their grief without needing them to perform recovery for my comfort.
This is what loss teaches, if you let it. Not to protect yourself from the next one—that is not a lesson love knows how to give. But to become, slowly, a person more adept to carry the weight of another human being. More capable of the full thing: the showing up, the staying, the willingness to be, as we say in Swahili, karibu—near, close, present, welcome.
Why We Keep the Museum Open
Someone asked me once why I write about loss. They meant it gently, but there was worry in the question—a concern that to write about it is to live there, to dwell in a damaged house by choice.
I understood the worry. I do not share it.
I write about loss for the same reason the museum in Zagreb exists: because naming a thing removes some of its power to operate unseen. Because the objects that survive love—the songs, the silences, the untranslated phrases that only meant something to two people who no longer speak—deserve the dignity of witness. Because grief that cannot be spoken tends to express itself in worse ways: as bitterness, as numbness, as the decision, taken quietly and never revisited, not to try again.
And because there is, I have found, remarkable company in the broken things. When you display them honestly—when you say: this is what I lost, this is what it looked like, this is what it cost—other people nod. They recognise something. They say, quietly or out loud: me too. Nami. Me too.
That is not a small thing. In a world that asks us constantly to appear intact, the acknowledgement that we are not, that we carry rooms of wreckage and continue anyway, is a form of solidarity that I would not trade for anything.
The museum stays open. I am still its curator. New exhibits arrive when I am not expecting them—they tend to come in quietly, without knocking—and I receive them the way you receive any important guest: with attention, with tea, with the willingness to listen to the whole story before deciding what it means.
The doors are always open. Come in. Look around. You will find, as I have found, that nothing in here is as frightening as it seemed when it was still outside.
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