Meaning had never been a function to him. It was a place, and he was the only one who seemed to live there.

He’d always noticed the abnormalities.

Like fractures in the world.

Those quiet irregularities that came with a loud silence, piercing through his perception.

The kind of silence that doesn’t remove sound, it pierces veils.

The boy asks you:

How do you think a door works?

“It’s a simple pattern, no?”

It opens.

It closes.

It guides.

But where does it guide you? And what decides that?

He wondered if the mind dictates what’s behind the door.

If the space beyond is always there, waiting patiently…

Or if it only exists once you choose to see it.

He didn’t believe doors were loyal to their destinations.

He believed they were shells.

Layers built to hide whatever the universe didn’t want people to notice.

When he touched a handle, he didn’t feel metal.

He felt emptiness.

A kind of structural hollowness. Like the door wasn’t attached to anything real, like it didn’t belong to a wall or a room but to some deeper, unspoken logic behind the world.

He walked through life this way:

a quiet observer,

collecting patterns,

never invited to speak them aloud.

Then came the night time stopped behaving.

He lay in bed, awake in a dark, cold room where silence pressed against his skin like a heavy atmosphere from another world. The only visible shape was the door, a pale outline, waiting. Not threatening. Not comforting. Just present, like it had finally acknowledged him.

It felt less like he had permission to approach it, and more like the universe had stopped resisting the fact that he knew.

He slid out of bed, legs first, his feet settling on a cold floor.

His heartbeat the only thing in the room that had a presence.

The knob was cold.

Not normal cold, aggressively cold.

Cold that refused to warm beneath his touch, as if heat did not exist on the other side.

A moment of profound stillness settled over everything.

For a breath, reality held itself in suspension.

Then the “what if” he had carried his whole life discretely resolved into “what is.”

The door, which had only ever opened properly before, gave way and opened backwards.

Not like a hinge moving.

More like a lock being undone.

(Like something finally giving up its lie.)

And on the other side was not his hallway.

Yet visually, it was identical.

Only… off.

Like a recording of his hallway.

A live loop.

Someone else’s surveillance footage of a place he’d walked a thousand times.

Stillness takes on a new definition here.

It isn’t lack of noise.

It’s the absence of sound as a form, the same way an image is absent of touch.

It feels like stepping into the backside of the world. The part that isn’t meant to be walked, only observed.