I’m intrigued enough to pay the seven-Euro entry fee and am handed a card that says ‘forevermore’, but when I lift the flap, the word changes to ‘nevermore’.
I giggle at this.
It’s a small museum, but filled with fascinating stories of personal and romantic relationships that ended, either dramatically or slowly over time.
For each story, there is an object, something the story-teller has given up to find peace from a broken relationship.
Some of the stories are funny, such as of the woman who donated her medication cream, saying that the only thing her husband gave her that outlived their relationship was herpes, and every time she has an outbreak and applies the cream, she thinks of him fondly.
And some of the stories are sad, such as of the woman who donated her wedding dress, who was only days from her wedding, having just taken her wedding photos with her fiancee, when he was killed in a terrorist attack in Istanbul.
The museum is small, but intense. It provides what most other museums, with their artifacts and technical details, generally do not – human stories.
I’m not the only one who laughs and then later chokes up in the museum.
Everyone seems to be moved by someone’s story.
The story of a broken relationship is universal – we’ve all suffered from it at one time or another – but somehow reading the stories of other people makes our own pain less intense, like we are part of a family.
To suffer from a broken relationship is to be human after all.
