I Found Traces of the Pandemic in a War Museum. I’ll Never Return.

You and I will create our version of a war museum, chronicling the pandemic battles we fought and lost and won.

Image provided by the author

If you suffer from melancholia and if you ever find yourself wandering the border of Luxembourg and Belgium, look for the city of Bastogne. At the outskirts of the centrum, you will find an unremarkable building and a five-point-star-shaped memorial just beside, both planted on a flat field that’s randomly blessed with firs. Do not go when the weather is nice.

The day I came, the sky was light and cerulean, the July heat was gentle and forgiving, and the summer air sweet and bucolic. Any day that’s not raining in Belgium is an ideal day to stay away from museums.

But in, I went.

The beginning of a revelation is something as mundane as an automatic sliding door and a middle-aged cheery-looking woman at the counter who greets you with an equally cheery bonjour-from-which-country-are-you-from when it is obvious that you don’t belong there. Nobody does.

“I live in Belgium now but I’m from the Philippines,” I told the woman.

I didn’t get to ask why that question was posed because my bladder was screaming and if I would make this little side trip worth it, I might as well do it on an empty bladder…