by Shannon Service
One question snowballed into a museum: What about the little wind-up bunny?
It was seven hours into our flight to Croatia when I starting worrying about the juggler’s balls in the luggage hold below. The balls were a gift from my ex-girlfriend Andrea, who made them out of socks stuffed with rice. They were exactly the right size for my small hands and landed with a dense, satisfying plunk. More importantly, they reminded me of the day I taught Andrea to juggle on the lawn outside my apartment.
I’d gotten her to the point where she could cycle through a few rounds, a feat accomplished through gritted teeth and wildly flailing limbs. I went inside while she practiced, catching her profile through the window: hair spiked up, body tilted to forty-five degrees, chasing her tosses across the window before disappearing. I laughed, but when she came back for another pass, I began to cry—overwhelmed by the knowledge that I was absolutely, incontrovertibly in love with this crazy person, balls aloft, in full physical comedy, running through my yard. But nine months of elation dissolved into nine months of hell, until we broke our engagement over what we agreed to call differing opinions on fidelity. From there it was five years of putting myself back together until, finally, there I was, forty thousand feet above Greenland, about to hand the juggler’s balls over to a couple I’d never met who ran a museum I half suspected was a brilliantly conceived gimmick.
As I drifted off to sleep, the balls started expanding in my mind. They grew and grew until I had the thought—grotesque, uninvited—of the juggling balls bursting out of the cargo hold and dangling beneath the plane like a pair of testicles, rocking back and forth so ferociously that the passengers began to panic, worried the plane would soon flip over. Pandemonium ensued. Cries and shrieks. Then, just as quickly, the thought passed, and I was left, once again, in row sixty-one, aisle seat, the lone passenger awake in a sea of angled heads.
Breakups are tough on the psyche. Really tough. One study shows there’s a chance that heartbreak alone can spur heart spasms in otherwise healthy people. The researchers call it “myocardial stunning due to exaggerated sympathetic stimulation”—a heart seizure brought on by overwhelming emotion. Most breakups aren’t lethal, of course, or most of us wouldn’t have survived junior high. But they can be substantial, and they run the full emotional gamut, varying in wide and interesting ways. Some splits are big and public, while others fracture in stifling silence. Paul Simon sang of “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” but it turns out there are far, far more than that. In fact, there are at least four hundred, as collected and assembled in Croatia’s newly opened Museum of Broken Relationships.
Which is exactly where I was headed.
The Museum of Broken Relationships was conceived late one night at a kitchen table in Zagreb. Late because OlinkaVistica worked long hours coordinating Croatia’s biggest film festival and late because Drazen Grubisic, her now ex-boyfriend, never put words together effectively until after noon. They sat across from each other in the house that seemed already cleaved down the middle, divvying up the physical remains of their four years together. Some objects were easily sorted by value—she gets the TV, he gets the computer—but then there were the incalculables, the objects with little monetary worth but pounds of emotional weight. Objects like the Little Wind-up Bunny.
The bunny is scruffy and about five inches tall. Sometimes, when Olinka came home at night, she’d open the door and find him marching in circles in the entryway. If one of them left on a trip, the bunny went along in the suitcase, and the partner at home got photos. There’s one picture of the bunny in Iran and another of him on a podium addressing a crowd. He didn’t belong to either of them as much as he belonged to both of them. But “they” had collapsed, which is why, late at night with their possessions all around them, they suddenly hit on the answer to the question that would snowball into a museum and send them both around the world: What about the Little Wind-up Bunny?
Olinka and Drazen are artists, and after some time passed, they did what artists often do: they put their feelings on display. They became investigators into the plane wreck of love, bagging and tagging individual pieces of evidence. Their collection of breakup mementos was accepted into a local art festival. It was a smash hit. Soon they were putting up installations in Berlin, San Francisco, and Istanbul, showing the concept to the world. Everywhere they went, from Bloomington to Belgrade, people packed the halls and delivered their own relics of extinguished love: “The Silver Watch” with the pin pulled out at the moment he first said, “I love you.” The wood-handled “Ex Axe” that a woman used to chop her cheating lover’s furniture into tiny bits. Trinkets that had meaning to only two souls found resonance with a worldwide audience that seemed to recognize the same heartache all too well.
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