Exit Sign

He woke up in a hospital bed again. The beeping monitors, the antiseptic smell, the sterile white walls—it was all different from yesterday’s dusty motel room, but one thing was exactly the same: the glowing green exit sign, mounted just above the door.

Michael sat up slowly, a dull ache crawling through his temples. He glanced at the nurse walking by. She smiled like she knew him. Maybe she did. He didn’t.

“Mr. Tannis,” she said, checking the IV line in arm. “You gave us a scare. How are you feeling?”

Michael blinked. Tannis? That wasn’t his name yesterday. Yesterday, he was Michael Rhodes, a school janitor with arthritis and a cat named Duke. Before that, he was someone else. An investment banker. A failed magician. A lonely park ranger. He had lived dozens of lives, all disjointed, but each beginning the same way—waking up, seeing the exit sign, and realizing this wasn’t his world.

The nurse left. He swung his legs over the bed and walked, barefoot, toward the door. The exit sign flickered softly, almost pulsing. It wasn’t just a piece of the architecture. It was a marker. A constant. His only anchor.

He reached for the door—then paused.

What if, just for today, he stayed?

He spent the day as Mr. Tannis. The doctors said he was recovering from a stroke. They seemed warm, genuine. A woman visited in the afternoon—his wife, apparently—and she kissed him on the forehead with trembling lips and eyes full of hope.

“I thought I lost you,” she whispered.

Michael—or Tannis—smiled politely, not sure how to respond. His body didn’t feel like his. The past didn’t either.

That night, he looked up at the ceiling of the hospital room, the moonlight dancing across the linoleum floor. The exit sign across the hall glowed softly like a nightlight meant for a child afraid of the dark.

“I want this one to last,” he said out loud to no one.

But it didn’t.

The next morning, he woke up in a moving car. Rain streaked the windshield, and unfamiliar hands gripped the steering wheel. He looked in the rearview mirror. New face. New hair. Same confused eyes.

And there it was again—the exit sign, this time on the side of the highway, glowing faintly in the distance like a silent reminder: “There is no staying.”

Michael—or whoever he was now—stopped questioning it. He lived lives like someone thumbing through a catalog. A marine biologist in Sydney. A drag queen in Berlin. A teenager in Tokyo. A dying man in hospice care, whispering apologies to people Michael had never met.

Each life had fragments of beauty: laughter, art, grief, intimacy. But they all ended with the same sleep, and began with the same cursed green glow.

He began to wonder if the exit sign was God—or a joke played by one.

One day, he woke up in a dim attic room, the musty smell of old books around him. Rain tapped against the window. In this life, he was a writer. A recluse. He found a journal under his pillow, opened it, and saw his own handwriting—even though he hadn’t written it.

“If you're reading this, you're finally catching up. The exit sign is a door. One day, you’ll walk through the right one.”

His breath caught.

What did that mean? The right one? Was there an end?

Years—or days—passed. He kept a journal in every life now, leaving breadcrumbs for the next version of himself. He learned how to paint, how to run, how to swim, how to cook. He loved people he would never see again. He buried people he had just met.

The sign stayed. Always the same. Always glowing.

Then, he woke up in a familiar room.

His childhood bedroom.

He gasped. The posters on the wall, the creaky floor, the broken desk with his initials carved into it—it was all real. He ran downstairs. There was his mother, making eggs, humming an old song she used to sing. She looked up and smiled with tears in her eyes.

“I was wondering when you’d come home,” she said.

Michael froze. On the kitchen wall, just above the back door, was the exit sign—but this time, it was off.

Not glowing. Not humming. Just a dead sign. A symbol with no power.

He sat down at the table, trembling.

Maybe this was the end.

Or maybe... this was the beginning.

"Sometimes the only way out is in."