Notes Toward a Museum That Won’t Last

“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

- W.B. Yeats

When the sky didn’t fall, but still cracked a little, we built a museum out past the flood line.

I. The Flying Museum is Temporary 

(Filed under: Wind Damage, Unlicensed Exhibits, Time-Sensitive Truths)

Let’s not pretend this will last. You’ve seen what happens to roadside shrines, to lawn chairs left out in monsoon season, to dreams written on poster board.

This is not a museum in the institutional sense. There’s no climate control. No docent in beige slacks asks you not to touch.

You’re already touching it. It’s already touching you back.

We built it in a desert. We had our reasons. One of them was: no one else had bothered to. Another: wind makes memory interesting.

We used what we had. A wingsuit. Some still-warm grief. Salt rings and monster books.

A few gestures you can’t exactly catalog but will recognize when you see them. The signage is irregular. Some of it is just chalk. Some of it is breath on glass. Some of it in languages that never made it to paper.

Nothing here is to scale. Not time. Not loss. Not what you meant to say but didn’t. It will vanish. That’s part of the contract. If you’re reading this, you’ve already agreed.

And when it goes, we hope something snags on your ribcage. Not pain, necessarily. Vibration. A reminder that flight was attempted. That something lifted. Even briefly.

Even now, we’re revising. The tape warps. Ink runs.

II. Considering the Characters in this Place

(Filed under: Incomplete Registries, Living Specimens)

We suggest a few names. They won’t stick. That’s the nature of names: you speak them to summon, not to define.

Start with Luz. One good eye. Two bad dreams. She walks like someone halfway through a disappearing act. Carries a pen, sometimes. Sometimes a knife. Sometimes it’s the same thing.

She once drew a bird on the wall of a shelter and told the girl beside her: “If it flies, it lives. That’s the rule.”

Then there’s the child. Babygirl, for now. All witness. No filter. Looks like she swallowed a storm map and is still figuring out how to read it. She draws monsters from memory. Then tries to name them. She thinks this is how you banish them. We don’t correct her.

Another presence: the unborn voice. Might arrive, might not. Sees the others from the side, the way a fish sees shoreline before it decides whether to surface. This voice prefers the margins. Lingers. Hums. Speaks in riddles, not out of cruelty, but because language doesn’t always hold when you’re still unformed. This voice may become a name one day. Or a myth. Or ash.

These three are only part of the population of this installation. There are others—sisters, ghosts, helpers, decoys. You’ll meet them. Or you won’t. This isn’t a guest list. This is a cross-section. Cut from the middle of the action, which was already unraveling when we arrived.

If you need a map, you’re in the wrong museum. Try the gift shop. Ask for the folded kind that never quite folds back.

Here, the rooms appear when you enter them. Here, the exits change depending on how you tell the story.

III: Instructions for Flight

(Filed under: Fugitive Fragments & Unverifiable Truths)

Start with a question. But keep it tucked under your tongue like a prayer or a pill. Don’t light it yet. Wait for the wind to die down. 

Or don’t wait. Wind doesn’t care.

How do you save what gets snuffed out when nobody’s watching? One voice won’t hold.

That’s physics, not metaphor. We arrive overlapping. Out of sync. Layered like cassette tapes stored too long in heat. We don’t take turns. We arrive together. This makes us unreliable. Which is not the same as wrong.

We were once unborn. A useful phase. Low overhead, flexible form. We resembled sea bells—translucent sacs that drift and pulse. Breath without body. Listening without ears. Flight-adjacent. We are not birds. We are not Icarus. We are not here for metaphors that die on impact.

There’s an exhibit at the end of this story. A man, midair. Constructed from loose images, parts, gestures—what’s left clinging after heatstroke or grief. We made it out of someone we meant to remember.  Of whom we lacked the means to create a full memorial. Meaning access. This, he would not really allow. He preferred certainties. He considered an impending apocalyptic sequence to be one of these. Plastic tubs in rows. Marked in black: FIRE. INSECT. INJURY. RAIN. Sweat at the collar, shirt sticking. Inside: bandages, lentils, iodine. A child’s life vest, unopened. He never said what for. We guessed. He kept checking––the bins, us. To be sure we were where he meant to keep us. The end, when it came, must have looked so much different than the one he imagined.

Now we offer another inventory, filed under what would not be contained.

This is what it means to offer: to surrender coherence in favor of possibility. To hold your hand out, palm up, even when nothing lands.

Creation. Destruction. We flipped the coin. It’s still in the air.

Eventually, surviving becomes the only choreography left. You learn to dance with danger until it leaves. Or until you do.

We’re not offering explanations. We’re offering the afterimage of contact.

We call the exhibit The Flying Museum. It was never meant to last. We built it for wind and time and the kind of looking that happens when there’s nothing left to lose.

We haven’t been back. The door blew off. The roof grew wings. This? This is a retrospective. Or a misfired echo. Or a rehearsal for something that didn’t happen. Yet.

We are practicing. Reaching. What flew may still be flying. Or has landed here unnamed, gathering dust and our attention. We don’t expect you to remember everything. Only the lift––and the breath before the story, the weather, or you––started breaking.