At the end of an ordinary street stood a museum that opened only once for each person.

Nobody knew when their invitation would arrive.

Mara received hers on a Tuesday.

She almost threw it away because the envelope looked like an electricity bill.

Inside was a single card.

THE MUSEUM OF LIVES YOU NEARLY LIVED

Admission: One

She arrived after sunset.

There was no queue.

An attendant opened the door.

“Are these my mistakes?” Mara asked.

“No.”

“My regrets?”

“Not necessarily.”

“What is here?”

“Possibilities.”

The first room contained a piano.

On its bench sat sheet music covered in notes written in Mara’s childhood handwriting.

She remembered lessons.

She remembered loving them.

She remembered stopping when school became serious and adults began asking what she planned to do with her life.

The next room contained an apartment in a city she had once planned to move to.

There were plants on the windowsill.

A half read novel lay beside the bed.

Photographs showed people she did not recognise.

“Are these things that would have happened?” she asked.

“No,” said the attendant.

“Then they are fake.”

“They are unchosen.”

The distinction irritated her.

Another room contained no career at all.

Just a long wooden table.

People were eating beneath trees.

Mara could not tell who she was supposed to be there.

That frightened her more than the other rooms.

She walked faster.

There was the business she had once imagined starting.

The relationship she had ended too quickly.

The relationship she was grateful she had ended.

A room devoted to a version of herself who had never become a mother.

Another belonging to a version who had become one earlier.

Some lives looked beautiful.

Some looked unbearable.

Most contained both.

At the end of the corridor was a locked door.

“What is in there?”

The attendant handed her a key.

Mara opened it.

The room was empty.

No furniture.

No photographs.

No clues.

“This museum is badly organised,” she said.

The attendant smiled.

“Everything behind you belongs to the past.”

“But none of it happened.”

“Exactly.”

Mara looked at the empty room again.

“Then what belongs here?”

“We don’t know yet.”

For the first time that evening, she understood.

The museum was not asking her to mourn every road she had failed to take.

It was showing her how easily an unlived possibility could become a ghost simply because she had once imagined it.

She had spent years occasionally wondering whether the other lives had been the correct ones.

But every room had been invented from the doorway.

She had never lived long enough inside any of them to discover their disappointments.

Only her actual life had been forced to become complicated.

Before leaving, Mara returned to the piano room.

She touched one key.

“Can I take this?”

“No.”

She nodded.

Then the attendant added:

“But there are piano shops outside the museum.”

Mara laughed.

The museum closed behind her.

It never opened for her again.

The following Saturday, she did not become the person she might have been.

She booked a piano lesson as the person she already was.

Fiction note

This is an original Arise Stories fable. Mara, the museum and all events are fictional.