My Museum of Lost Things

It's 10:30 PM and I'm supposed to be with my friend for a study session but I'm scrolling through old photos on my phone, the ones from three years ago that the algorithm keeps trying to show me as "memories." Except they don't feel like memories. They feel like artifacts from a life that belonged to someone else, someone who looked like me but existed in a world I can no longer access.

There's one of me and my friends at Eid that year, all of us squeezed into the frame, laughing at something I can't remember now. And I'm staring at it, trying to recall what was so funny, trying to remember what that version of me was thinking, what she was worried about, what she wanted. But she's a stranger to me now. I know her face but I don't know her anymore.

I think I've been building a museum in my mind without realizing it. A museum of lost things. Not things that were taken from me, but things that simply stopped existing. Friendships that faded so gradually I didn't notice they were disappearing until they were already gone. Versions of myself I shed without meaning to. Moments I didn't know were last moments until much later when I was searching for them and they were nowhere to be found.

There's a whole wing dedicated to people who used to be my whole world. My best friend from nursery school who I promised I'd never lose touch with. We meant it when we said it, both of us crying when I changed schools, exchanging friendship bracelets and swearing we'd best eachother at our respective weddings. But then elementary school happened, and new friends happened, and life happened, and one day I realized we hadn't spoken in months. Then years. And now she's just a name I haven't heard in years , living a life I know nothing about, probably not thinking about me at all.

There's the group chat that used to buzz all day, every day, with inside jokes and plans and the kind of comfortable intimacy that makes you feel invincible. Four of us, inseparable, convinced we'd be friends forever. The chat still exists. I checked. The last message was sent eight months ago. Someone's matriculation. A few of us sent the obligatory "Happy matriculation, girrllll!" with the cap and confetti emoji. No one responded. Not even the matriculating person. And no one suggested meeting up. Because somewhere along the way, without any dramatic falling out or final goodbye, we just stopped being we.

I have an entire corridor dedicated to the things I used to love that I can't seem to love anymore. There's a novel I read seven times when I was fifteen, carried it everywhere, quoted it constantly, felt like the author had written it specifically for me. I tried to read it again last month. Got three chapters in and felt nothing. The magic was gone. Not because the book changed, but because I did, and whatever part of me that book spoke to doesn't exist anymore.

There's a cute playlist I made in SS3, nasheeds that felt like they were explaining my soul back to me. I played it yesterday out of nostalgia and had to turn it off after two. Not because the lyrics were bad or anything, but because listening to it felt like looking at old photos of someone who died and a part of ne has grown on listening to the Qur'an rather than any other thing. That version of me who needed them, who understood them, who felt seen by them, she's gone. And I'm grieving her even though no one else knows she's missing.

In the corner, there's a collection of dreams I forgot I had. I wanted to be a full-time writer once. Not casually, not as a hobby, but really be one. I had notebooks full of stories, character sketches, plot outlines. I'd spend hours world-building, getting lost in narratives only I could see. And then somewhere between exams and expectations and the practical realities of life, I just... stopped. The notebooks are still in my room, shoved to the back of a drawer I never open. I can't remember the last time I wrote something so unhinged just because I wanted to, just because the story demanded to be told.

There's a section for all the versions of my family I've lost as I've grown up. My grandfather who used to be a giant, who could fix anything, who had all the answers. I still love him, but I've seen him cry now. I've seen him not know what to do. I've watched him age in real time, watched his certainty crack, watched him become human in ways that both comforted and terrified me. The grandfather who could protect me from everything is gone,teach me everything including the story of how he grew up with his siblings is no longer really there. In his place is a man still doing his best, and that's somehow harder to accept.

My mother who used to be invincible, who never seemed tired, who held everything together with a strength I thought was infinite. I've watched her get exhausted now. I've heard the defeat in her voice when she thinks no one's listening. I've seen her cry at night when she thought everyone was asleep. And I can't unknow it. Can't unsee it. Can't go back to the child who believed her mother was made of something stronger than bone and blood.

There's a gallery dedicated to places that don't exist anymore. Not because they were torn down or renovated, but because I'm not the person who experienced them anymore. The classroom where I had my first real conversation about life and death with friends who felt like philosophers. I walked past that room last year when I visited my alma mater. It's just a room now. The magic is gone. Whatever made it special was never in the walls, it was in who I was when I sat in those chairs.

The small shop near my house where I used to buy snacks after school, where the owner knew my name and my order, where I felt known and seen in a way that mattered to teenage me. The shop is still there. The owner still is too. But when I go there now, I'm just another customer. Not because he's forgotten me, but because the version of me he knew doesn't exist anymore, and neither of us knows how to acknowledge that. And I have outgrown the version of me who eats junk without reasoning that Diabetes Mellitus is a thing.

The one colourful Indian dress my grandmother got me from hajj. I wore it at every chance I got until adolescence kicked in and it jumped and I could no longet where dresses above my ankle.

I think the hardest part of this museum is that no one else can visit it. No one else knows what I've lost because most of it was never visible to anyone but me. How do you mourn a version of yourself that only you knew? How do you grieve for feelings you can't feel anymore, for passions that have gone cold, for certainties that have dissolved?

My friend asked me the other day if I miss being a child. And I wanted to say no, because I'm supposed to be excited about growing up, about independence, about all the freedom that comes with getting older. But the truth is I miss it desperately. Not the actual childhood, not the lack of responsibility or the simpler problems. I miss the capacity for wonder I used to have. The ability to be completely absorbed in something. The way time used to stretch out endlessly instead of slipping through my fingers.

I miss believing things wholeheartedly. I miss the version of me that could be certain about who I was and what I wanted. I miss not being aware of all the ways the world is broken. I miss thinking that loving people was simple, that being a good person was straightforward, that life had clear answers if you just searched hard enough.

There's a locked room at the back of this museum that I don't enter often. It's where I keep the people who are still alive but lost to me anyway. The friend who betrayed my trust and never apologized. The family member who said something so hurtful that the relationship never recovered. The person I loved who didn't love me back, who's living their life somewhere not knowing they occupy an entire wing of my personal museum of grief.

It's still this hot, starless and quiet night and the photos are still on my screen. I'm not scrolling anymore, just staring at this one picture, this moment frozen in time, this evidence that I was once someone else and didn't know I was already beginning to disappear.

I’ll say we all have this museum. We're all walking around carrying these archives of lost things, these galleries of who we used to be and what we used to have and where we used to find meaning. And we pretend we're fine. We post about growth and moving forward and becoming better versions of ourselves. But privately, in moments like this when it's too late to sleep and too early to start the day, we walk through our museums and mourn.

Mourning. Grief for things that aren't dead but are no longer alive in the way they once were. Grief for the child you were who believed in magic. Grief for the friendships that weren't destroyed but simply dissolved. Grief for the dreams you didn't abandon but somehow lost anyway. Grief for all the versions of yourself you had to leave behind to become who you are now.

Oh well ,not to be a sadist, but it's all an endless process of loss disguised as progress. A constant shedding of selves and loves and certainties, each one leaving a ghost behind that haunts your personal museum, reminding you of what it cost to become whoever you're becoming.

I'm closing the photos app now. Putting the phone down. Trying to sleep. But the museum will always be there, doors always open, lights always on, waiting for me to return and wander its halls, looking at all the beautiful, irretrievable things I've lost along the way.

And in the morning, I'll wake up and pretend I'm fine. I'll move forward because that's what you do. You keep going. You keep building new rooms in the museum even as you're forced to abandon old ones. You keep becoming new versions of yourself even as you grieve the ones you're leaving behind.

Because ehat else can you really do? You can't stay in the museum forever. You can't live in the past even when the past feels more real than the present. You can't be the person you used to be, no matter how much you miss them.

So you keep walking. Keep losing. Keep building. Keep mourning.

And you hope that someday, the person you're becoming will be worth all the people you had to stop being to get there.