unwanted.

I don’t know when this room stopped changing. Its walls remain white—white in the way memories are forced clean. In the corner stands a plastic chair missing one leg, leaning like someone who has waited too long and finally surrendered to imbalance. The ceiling light hums faintly, its rhythm like the breathing of someone asleep without dreams.

I sit on the cold floor, staring at the line between tiles. It used to feel like a border between something and something else. Now it’s just a crack. I’ve tried asking myself: am I still here, or just the shadow of someone who once was?

Outside the window, there is no outside. Only gray light—neither morning nor dusk—as if the world forgot where to put its sun. Sometimes I hear footsteps, though there’s no door in this room. Maybe they come from inside my head. Maybe from the walls mimicking human sounds. I’ve started to believe this room speaks in its own language: through echoes, through uncertainty.

I once had a name, but now my name feels like something dropped into water too deep. I remember the sound of it, but I can’t reach it anymore.

This place was—or perhaps still is—a small room behind what used to be called a house. I remember someone closing its door from the outside. I remember the sound of a key turning slowly, as if that person wanted me to hear it. After that, only silence. And I learned to speak to walls.

Walls listen better than humans. They don’t look back with judgment; they only return the echo of my words until I forget which voice was mine. Sometimes I think the walls love me. Sometimes I think they only keep my body from slipping out of the world.

Every day I wake up and try to recall the sequence of things that once mattered: breath, steps, light, shadow. But something between them is always missing. Today, it’s hunger. I eat the air, and it tastes no different from the cold bread I used to despise. My body seems to have forgotten how to be alive.

I find myself often speaking to my own shadow. Sometimes it answers, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve begun to wonder if I’m not someone abandoned, but someone hidden on purpose. There’s a difference—one is still awaited, the other deliberately forgotten. I think I’m the latter.

Some time ago—though time here moves like a broken clock that keeps ticking—I found a small mirror beneath a rusted bed frame. The glass was cracked, splintering my face into pieces that refused to join. I stared at it for a long time. That face looked like a stranger pretending to be me. In those fractures, I thought I saw someone else—or maybe myself in another time—trying to get out of here.

I spoke to them.
“Are you still there?”
But there was no answer, only the trembling reflection of my own eyes caught between two worlds that don’t trust each other.

I don’t know how long I sat there. Sometimes I hear a faint sort of music—not quite a song, more like the dying hum of a machine. Its rhythm falters, like a heart that has forgotten its duty. I press my ear to the floor, and the sound seems to come from beneath.

I peek through the crack between tiles, and for a moment I’m certain I see something down there: another room, same shape, but brighter. In it stands someone—or something—looking up at me. Their face is unclear, but I know they’re smiling.

I step back. My hands shake.
I know this place mimics everything, even the idea of escape.

After that, I began to write on the walls. Words that no longer matter, but still want to exist. “I am here,” I wrote first. “I am still here,” I wrote the next day. “I don’t know why I am here,” on the third. After weeks, the words covered the entire wall. Yet somehow, every time I woke, some of them were gone. As if the room was swallowing parts of me each night.

Sometimes I think maybe this isn’t a prison. Maybe it’s my own body. A place where I’m trapped not by locks, but by existence itself. Maybe I was never imprisoned—just never invited back into the world.

I started noticing small things: the temperature shifting for no reason, footsteps stopping right behind me without leaving a shadow, the smell of dust suddenly turning sweet like burnt sugar. I know they’re symbols, but I don’t know of what. Maybe the room is trying to tell me something, only its language isn’t made for humans.

One night—if night can exist here—I heard the sound of a door opening. Even though I have no door. It came from the direction of that gray light, and there, for the first time, I saw a silhouette standing amid thin mist. Its body was nearly transparent, but shaped like mine.

It said,
“You’re not supposed to be here.”

I replied hoarsely,
“Where else, then?”

It didn’t answer. It only stepped backward into the mist, and I found myself running after it. But every step dragged me backward. The floor turned slick, the air thickened. I kept running even as my body blurred at the edges of my own sight.

When I reached the spot where it had stood, only the plastic chair remained—yet now it stood upright. I touched it. Warm. As if someone had just been sitting there.

I sat on it, and something shifted. The walls began to breathe, slowly. The light stopped humming. For the first time, I heard my own heartbeat. But its rhythm wasn’t human—it echoed like footsteps walking alone through an endless corridor.

I asked the room again: “Do you want me to leave?”

No answer—but the floor trembled slightly, as if nodding.

That night I dreamed—or perhaps I didn’t sleep at all. In the dream, I was walking along an empty highway. Sodium lamps hung above like impatient moons. I didn’t know where the road led, but each step felt like a memory being forcibly returned. At the end of the road, someone waited. They waved; their face was blurred. I tried to reach them, but my body began to fade.

When I woke, I didn’t know where I was. The walls were higher, cleaner white, the air colder. In the corner, the plastic chair was whole again, flawless. The walls were bare—every word I’d written gone, as if erased perfectly.

I felt I’d been moved—not out, but into another version of the same place.

I laughed softly. Maybe that’s the punishment for people like me: never truly expelled, just shifted from one nothingness to another.

I started writing again on the new wall. “I am here.”
This time, the words vanished the moment I finished them.

I smiled. Maybe that means the room has learned to speak without words.

Days that followed felt like fragments of a dream refusing to merge. I don’t know if I’m still moving, or if the world is moving beneath me. Once, I found a small thing on the floor: a nail clipping—maybe mine, maybe someone else’s. I stared at it for a long time, and somehow I felt it knew something I didn’t.

I placed it on an imaginary table—because there is no table here, but imagining one is enough. Then I spoke to it like an old friend: I told it about the sound of the lamp, about the shadows that visit on nights without time, about how I’ve started to miss the feeling of hunger.

Mid-sentence, the nail trembled. Just slightly. As if acknowledging me. I stared at it, then laughed. “You understand, don’t you?” I said. And for the first time, I didn’t feel entirely alone.

Time began to lose shape. Some days the room looked like a long school corridor—chalk-scented, ending in a blackboard whose writing can’t be read. Sometimes it turned into a hospital waiting room with blue chairs, old magazines, and a clock frozen at thirteen. Sometimes I drifted between the two without knowing when the shift occurred.

Every place carried the same feeling: as if someone had just left, leaving behind the warmth of their body in the air. I tried to follow that direction, but every step only led me back here.

I started to believe these rooms were growing out of my own mind. That every wall, every chair, every tile was the embodiment of a desire buried too long. I don’t know if that means I still control it—or if it means I’ve lost all control.

One day, I found a door. A real door.
Gray, without a handle, but with a thin slit down the center leaking light like breath. I don’t know how long it’s been there—perhaps always—but only now do I see it.

I pressed my palm to it. Cold.
Then a voice came, clear this time, from behind it:
“Why are you still here?”

I tried to answer, but no sound left my throat. Something inside, a cord, held me back. I hit the door, but each strike dimmed the light further. Finally I stopped, leaned against its frozen silence, and cried.

I don’t remember the last time I cried.
My tears fell to the floor, and from each drop something small grew—like seeds. Within seconds they became strange flowers: translucent petals, stems pulsing gently like veins.

I stared.
“Did I make this?” I whispered.

The flowers hummed softly, like mosquito wings. I leaned closer, and inside I heard tiny voices—not words, just murmurs that sounded like fragments of myself.

“I want to leave.”
“I don’t deserve to exist.”
“I don’t want to be remembered.”

They were echoes spilling from my chest, and I realized these flowers had sprouted from the things I never said—from the rejections I’d carefully tended.

I plucked one flower and placed it against the wall. The wall shivered, then opened slightly—not enough to pass through, but enough to see what lay beyond. A city. Empty. Streets filled with flickering green lights. Tall buildings with windows that stared back without eyes.

In the middle of that city, someone walked alone, dragging a suitcase. From afar I knew: it was me. But a different version—calmer, more solid. They walked without looking back.

I wanted to scream, but the wall closed before I could make a sound.

After that, the room went completely dark. No light, no sound. Only the steady beat of my heart, marking existence. In that darkness, a whisper came:
“You’re not wanted there.”
I answered softly, “I know.”

Then it said again, “But you’re not wanted here either.”

I laughed quietly. “Then where should I be?”

No reply. But something inside me shifted—not fear, but a strange awareness, like remembering something that never happened.

I began to think: maybe there is no ‘there’ and ‘here’.
Maybe this entire space is a projection of a body rejecting itself. Maybe I am unwanted because I’ve refused to want.

When the light finally returned, I was no longer in that room. I stood in the middle of a silent highway. On either side, billboards shimmered, all their letters reversed. The air smelled of rain that hadn’t yet fallen. No cars, no people. Only the long white line down the center, separating two directions that would never meet.

I walked along that line, and each step felt like writing a new sentence into the air.
“I once lived.”
“I am still alive.”
“I want to know what it feels like to be wanted.”

I didn’t know where I was going. But far ahead, there was a small light, flickering like the heartbeat of a newborn. I walked toward it, slowly.

Around me, the world began to fill itself in. Buildings grew out of fog, lamps lit one by one, and the wind carried faint murmurs like the voices of people suddenly remembering their dreams.

And among those whispers, something called my name—a name long lost. I turned, but no one was there. Only my reflection in a puddle, forming a slow smile.

I crouched, staring into it. It spoke without sound:
“You are here because you chose to remain.”

I touched the surface. The reflection rippled into circles, but its voice stayed, echoing in my mind like an unfinished spell.

I kept walking until the light ahead grew too bright to look at.
In that glare, I felt my body dissolve, like paper soaked in water. There was no pain—only lightness, as if all the walls within me collapsed at once.

Before everything turned completely white, I heard one last whisper:
“Sometimes the world doesn’t reject you. Sometimes it just hasn’t learned how to hold someone like you.”

And I stopped resisting.
Letting the light swallow my shape.

For the first—or perhaps the last—time,
I felt wanted.