I.
You don’t remember arriving.
The museum breathes with a low mechanical rasp—the kind of sound that, once heard, can’t be unheard. The overhead lights buzz, a grid of harsh rectangles sunk into the ceiling. They stutter, casting a cold, exhausted glow. The floor tiles, the color of old teeth, shift slightly underfoot—almost like the ground itself is thinking about letting go.
The air tastes metallic. Artificial. Somewhere deep inside the walls, a duct sighs.
No line. No lobby music. No announcements crackling over intercoms. Just a sign hanging crooked on one loose bolt: LOST ITEMS ONLY. The painted letters are dulled and chipped at the edges, like worn-out polished nails.
You double back across the tiles, retracing steps you don’t remember taking.
Left past the broken vending machine—its face dim and empty, coils frozen in place. Past the coatroom, where a single wire hanger swings slowly from the bar, though there is no breeze. Left again. Right. Left. And it is again: the same wall. The same crooked sign.
You reach out, expecting the polished smoothness of a real museum wall. Instead, the wall is textured—rough like weathered stone. As if millions of hands have passed over it, etching their confusion into its skin.
The door doesn’t move. It doesn’t push back. It doesn’t even notice you.
You glance around for windows, exits, or some marker of place. Nothing. Only sterile corridors uncoiling outward, folding into one another like intestines. Only the steady press of conditioned air, just a few degrees too cool for comfort.
You check your pockets—front, back, jacket—and find only the hollow tug of fabric turned inside out. Their emptiness feels heavier than keys ever did.
A pulse thrums in your throat, faster than it should. You turn in a slow circle, scanning the walls for some overlooked seam: an exit sign, a hinge, even a crack in the paint. Nothing. The overhead lights give a low click, like a camera shutter that will never open again.
Your breath catches, jagged, halfway down your chest.
You cough once, but the sound is too small for the room. It dies at your feet. Something salty rises behind your tongue—fear or metal, or both. Instinct says move, so you step back the way you think you came, heel scraping tile.
Two steps. Three.
The air doesn’t change. The temperature stays constant. Even your shadow clings to the same patch of floor.
You stop. You consider planting yourself here, refusing to move, becoming a fixture that the museum will eventually have to catalog.
But the stillness feels worse than walking. So you go—not toward anything, just away. Away from the scream gathering in the back of your skull.
II.
The room is merciful, almost tender.
Behind glass: a pair of sneakers. The soles are worn thin, tongues sagging out like exhausted mouths. The laces are still stained from that night you ran across the grocery-store parking lot, high on panic you mistook for purpose. They’re yours, but they look child-sized now, as if shrinking were part of the penalty—a cruel reminder of what you lost.
Next to it: a hospital ID band. The plastic is yellowed, the clasp warped from heat, the barcode half-melted into the laminate. You remember peeling it off in the parking lot, swearing you’d never go back. You didn’t.
A little farther down: a varsity letter. Its corners curl inward, ink bled into hair-thin cracks. You lean in, but the lettering has faded to a gray blur—words you once knew and now can’t make out.
Next case: a navy Georgetown sweatshirt. You remember it being two sizes too big, but just the right fit. It still carries a whisper of that cologne you told yourself you’d forgotten.
Each object sits in a glass box, perfectly square, lit by thin, cold spotlights. Beneath each one, a tarnished brass plate reads its title in a brisk, bureaucratic font—some letters chipped, others clouded by fingerprints:
Exhibit 2A: Misplaced Certainties (2018–2021)
Exhibit 2B: Ambitions, Pre-Recalibration
The formality makes it worse, like an obituary written by a stranger.
You move along the wall, expecting more things: a lost glove, a cracked phone, the stray evidence of losses you never volunteered—but instead you find them.
Versions of yourself.
Carefully posed.
Pinned like insects in glass display cases.
The you who thought growing up would arrive like a scheduled flight—punctual, irreversible. The you who believed that some people would never leave. That promises meant permanence. That mistakes could be outrun if you moved fast enough.
They stand stiffly, smiling with the brittle sincerity only mannequins can manage. Their clothes are slightly wrong—fabric thinning at the elbows, colors sun-bleached and uneven, the vibrancy bleached out under institutional lighting.
One figure in particular draws you closer: a younger you, phone in hand. You squint at the screen: it’s Cerca, the dating app for mutuals, not strangers. You know that pose. You remember practicing it in the mirror. You lean in. The glass fogs slightly from your breath.
The figure blinks.
Just once.
You jerk back, heart pounding.
When you look again, it’s stiff. Frozen.
You laugh—or try to. But the sound breaks apart before it reaches the air, swallowed by the glass cases and too-bright lights.
You move on. Faster now.
III.
You try to ignore it. You think if you walk fast enough—if you don’t name it—it might leave you alone. But it follows. It thickens. It chews at the edges of your thoughts.
It’s in the air now, seeping into your skin like humidity.
It pulses behind your eyes.
It wants you still.
The vending machine blinks as you pass it again, still flashing its empty promises. The plastic coils look sharper now—almost like teeth. You imagine reaching in, letting it clamp down. Just to feel something honest.
You head back the way you think you came, passing the vending machine again—its screen cracked now, blinking nonsense characters. It whirs as you pass, louder than before, as if sensing you. As if asking for something.
Every return trip adds a step you don’t remember. The corridor tightens. The ceiling dips.
The fluorescents flicker harder, bleaching away depth until each display looks pressed flat against the wall. When you reach the sneaker case again, the laces twitch—just a thread’s width, like something barely breathing. It’s not just the sneakers. None of the exhibits are still.
The sweatshirt lifts, collapses, lifts again—fabric relearning the shape of a breath it hasn’t taken in years.
Your reflection in the glass is wrong: longer arms, hollowed eyes, a mouth too wide to close. You flinch. A breath catches.
The hunger leaks into the museum. It soaks into the floors, oils the hinges.
The ache becomes a shared language between you and whatever built this place.
Your body is the first to lose shape. Your stomach cinches inward. Your fingers tremble under their own weight. Your knees forget how to lock. Then your mind follows—slower, dumber—forgetting how many rooms you’ve passed, then how long you’ve been walking, then why it ever mattered.
You wonder if you’re already an exhibit. Waiting for a plaque.
Maybe you have one.
Maybe you’ve had one since before you knew how to look away.
The museum feeds on your hunger. It curates it, catalogs it, polishes it until it gleams.
You walk because you’re afraid to stop.
Because if you stop, you’ll see it: Your face behind glass, eyes open, mouth carved into a smile you don’t remember making.
Legs numb, spine bending wrong, you walk.
Ankles folding, breath hitching, you walk.
Whatever shape is left, dragged forward by hunger alone, you walk.
IV.
One corridor narrows into a dead end: a wire-glass fire door held shut by two rusted bolts.
Beyond it, under too many fluorescent lights: a sealed room.
Everything inside looks faded, though nothing is old.
There are no shadows—only flat surfaces, still air, and the faint chemical bite of sun-heated bleach and plastic. You look closer without meaning to.
Then you look around.
A photograph turned face-down, its frame cracked and clumsily taped at the corners.
A key without a lock, hanging limp from a thread.
A hospital bracelet, the numbers half-erased.
A book left open to a page where the handwriting veers off into nothing.
And at the center: a blank pedestal. A plaque screwed into the base, letters cleaner than anything else in the museum: SOMETHING YOU HAVE NOT LOST YET.
You stand there for a long time. Long enough for your legs to ache.
You lean your forehead against the glass because you don’t know what else to do. The glass is warm. It smells faintly of your own skin.
You don’t test the handle. Whatever’s behind the door is already yours to lose; touching it won’t change the outcome.
The door isn’t locked to protect the objects. It’s locked to remind you they’re past saving—and to warn you about what will replace them.
So you stay until the lights burn a white bar across your vision. Until the urge to open anything at all burns out.
Only then do you turn back down the corridor, slower than before, carrying a new weight you can’t yet name—but know you’ll feel when it disappears.
You don’t look back.
You carry it with you.
V.
There is no leaving.
Only staying long enough to forget you ever tried.
The halls stretch thinner. The lights flicker less often.
You lose track of what you’ve passed—which jacket, which book, which name etched into brass.
You lose track of what you meant to find. What you were supposed to save.
Your body unlearned itself a long time ago. Legs twitch forward on instinct alone; joints click, half-remembering how to hinge.
Your hunger rots into something smaller, something shapeless.
It sours quietly somewhere behind your ribs—not pain, not need, just leftover motion.
You pace because standing still feels heavier. You stop because each step lands hollow, like walking on loose floorboards in a dream—
Then you lurch forward again—slower, slower—until the truth settles: the hallway hasn’t moved, and neither have you.
You start to wonder if you ever really did.
There are no mirrors here. Only glass you can almost see through.
Sometimes you catch a glimpse: a figure slumped at the edges, a mouth half-open, waiting for a name that won’t come.
You think about closing your eyes, but you already have.
You forget when you stopped reading the plaques.
You forget when they stopped putting plaques out at all.
You forget what your name looked like in print.
You forget what it felt like to have weight.
There is no final room.
No final door.
Just the slow collapse of meaning, one exhibit at a time.
Just the silent agreement between you and the walls: You are staying. You are staying. You are staying.
No ceremony.
No plaque.
No glass.
Just the knowledge: whatever you were is already behind you, and whatever you are now doesn’t need a frame.
The museum does not close.
It simply forgets to notice you.
You forget to notice yourself.
The hunger is quiet now.
It is small enough to hold in your palm.
Small enough to lose.
Nothing moves, yet the corridor drifts by anyway. But no one is watching.
Not even you.
Luke Wagner ’26 (lukewagner@college.harvard.edu) is the Vice President of the Harvard Independent.