The older we get, the more delicate an endeavor it becomes to stare a not-so-stranger in the face and invite them to approach our cabinet of personal curios. The next bold move? An exhibition: to hazard being known.

When we’re young, taking inventory of each and every artifact, detailing its provenance and meaning, is risibly simple. A broken romance here, a loss there, a miraculous June at summer camp stashed in the corner; these woes and delights are small, still unfreighted with the lessons imposed by time. With the years, we accrue weightier things that take up space on the shady lower shelves. Below the nautilus-shelled vacation memories, flutter-tipped county fair ribbons, and butterfly wings, adding substance to the shinier stuff of life and the stuff that might not be shiny but might, for the right person, invite a conversation, there are the things that make us real. They are the lessons we’ve hauled on the long walk to now, the bits of shrapnel we’ve removed from our flesh but kept as mementoes in jars with tight lids. They are the things that have changed our hearts and marked our skin.

Everyone grows old. We become worldly and fill shelves. We keep the contents of our wunderkammern with equal parts defiance and love. And we learn that another’s desire to view our collection isn’t just a matter of patience or time, but also taste — a thing as specific and uncontrollable as the wind. Inviting someone to listen, to know, to see, is a risk. Like most worthwhile things, we don’t often get the first time right.

But it is vital that we keep trying.

My ears stay pricked for an open heart, a knowing look, a calm, fearless will to sit beside me in the tenuous dawn of a thing that may or may not be, and say, “I am here to learn.”