The Museum of Missed Heartbeats

Welcome.

You enter through a narrow vestibule where silence is the ticket.

No words exchanged, only the soft thud of your own pulse

echoing in your ears.

The floor beneath you creaks as if it, too, remembers hesitation.

The first gallery is modest.

In glass cases lie the beginnings that never began—

the smile I almost returned,

the name I almost asked,

the hand I almost reached for.

Each is pinned like a butterfly,

delicate wings spread,

frozen mid-flight.

Further on, a room of clocks.

Hundreds line the walls,

each stopped at the exact second of an almost.

One ticks forever toward the night I nearly confessed,

another toward the morning I almost stayed in bed instead of leaving.

The silence of the stopped hands

is deafening.

You move into the corridor of unopened doors.

Their handles gleam from the touch of indecision,

their hinges sag with the weight of what-ifs.

Some lead to rooms you will never enter,

others to lives you can only imagine.

The plaques read simply: Here, you hesitated.

In the chamber of unsent letters,

rows of envelopes wait patiently in glass drawers.

Some are written in ink blurred by tears,

others in drafts that trail into nothing.

The addresses are to strangers, lovers,

future selves, even to ghosts.

All unclaimed.

The gallery of footsteps not taken

is lined with shoes.

Boots carrying the dust of roads I turned away from,

heels still sharp from a dance I never joined,

barefoot imprints pressed into soil

that remembers the weight of hesitation.

Visitors walk slowly here,

their own shoes echoing too loudly.

Then the room of almost-kisses.

Glass domes contain the fragile air

between one mouth and another.

Each display hums with tension,

as if a single breath could shatter it.

The labels are brief: Summer. Rain. Her laughter.

Autumn. Silence. His eyes.

In an alcove sits a solitary chair.

Its cushion is indented

by the weight of conversations never spoken.

If you sit, you will feel them vibrate in your chest—

sentences rehearsed,

confessions bitten back,

apologies left to rot.

Beyond it, the hall of withheld tears.

Jars of glass hold droplets that never fell.

Some are clear as morning dew,

others darkened with anger or grief.

When the light passes through them,

rainbows arc across the walls—

beauty born of what was stifled.

There is a room for glances not returned,

where mirrors hang on every wall.

You catch yourself looking,

catch yourself looking away.

It is impossible to stay long.

The wing of unfinished songs

whispers faint melodies.

Fragments of humming,

lyrics scratched and abandoned mid-line.

Every visitor leaves with a tune stuck in the throat.

At last, in the center of the museum,

you arrive at the empty pedestal.

It is cordoned off,

its plaque engraved:

Reserved for the heartbeat withheld.

The one that could have altered everything,

but instead remained locked inside,

silent as stone.

The museum has no exit.

Only a loop that brings you back to the beginning,

where your own pulse

is added quietly to the collection.