travel amp

Breakup travel is the new breakup haircut — here’s what I mean.

For years, I stole teaspoons from restaurants. They were, for me, souvenirs of perfect meals — proof that I’d tasted things, that I’d loved them. Sometimes, I’d pocket them before dessert had even arrived, as if the storing of the memory were more critical than the real-time event as it unspooled. Technically, it’s a form of petty theft — but nobody says as much if you call it collecting.

On the whole, it would seem that we’re most enamored of “collecting” on two precise occasions: when in transit and when in love. In foreign cities, we amass train tickets, matchbooks, beaded things, paper maps, proof that we ate there, swam there, breathed that air. Falling in love, then, we play at tourism of a different kind, new thresholds of sensation, new modes of translation. We save handwritten notes, birthday gifts, wine corks, photographs. Artifacts that, like souvenirs, grow heavier when they refer to something in the past tense.

The Museum of Broken Relationships was founded in 2010, home to countless “souvenirs” of — you guessed it — broken relationships. While the original concept still stands in Croatia, outpost exhibitions have cropped up across the globe, lending limited-time shelter to assorted relics of local heartbreak: well-worn T-shirts, cracked ceramics, hand-written Post-it notes, pregnancy tests — each submitted with a testimonial outlining its significance. Each insisting that, yes, we were here, we were real, we happened, look at this thing, see for yourself.

I visited the exhibition — a satellite installation in Mexico City — three weeks into the first long-term trip I’d ever undertaken without a partner. Or, at least, without a partner awaiting me at home, phoning me at the airport to ensure I’d landed