The Room Without Doors

I wake up, as always, in the same room. The walls are gray, but I don’t remember if they were always gray or if they simply absorbed the color of my thoughts over time. There is a door, but it does not open. Or maybe it does, and I have forgotten how to turn the handle. In any case, I do not leave.

Loneliness is not an event. It does not arrive with fanfare or explanation. It is a slow accumulation, like dust settling in corners you rarely notice. You do not decide to be alone; you simply wake up one day and realize that no one has knocked on your door for a long time.

At first, I tried to fight it. I wrote letters, but I had no one to send them to. I walked the streets, but the people I passed were like shadows, their faces indistinct, their voices muffled. I tried to summon memories of warmth, of conversation, of touch. But memories are unreliable—paper-thin imitations of something that once had weight. Eventually, even they began to fade.

There is a man who sometimes appears in my dreams. He wears a hat, smokes a cigarette, and speaks in riddles. Last night, he sat across from me at a café that no longer exists and stirred his coffee without drinking it.

“You are mistaken,” he said. “You think loneliness is an absence, but it is not. It is a presence.”

“A presence?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Like fog. Like hunger. It fills the spaces between things. It grows when you try to ignore it.”

I woke up before I could ask him what to do.

This morning, I stood in front of the mirror for a long time. My reflection looked unfamiliar, like a photograph left in the sun too long. I touched the glass, as if trying to confirm my own solidity. I wondered, briefly, if I had become a ghost. But no—ghosts haunt others. I haunt only myself.

Outside, the world continues. People board trains, read newspapers, fall in love, make mistakes, grow old. I remain here, in my room without doors, waiting for something that will not come.

Perhaps the man in my dream was right. Loneliness is not an absence. It is a thing with shape and substance. It sits beside me as I write this. It watches over my shoulder. It will be here tomorrow.

And the day after that.

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