The Room Without a Door

There’s a room I don’t talk about.

It doesn’t exist in any house I’ve lived in, and yet, it lives inside me—quiet, waiting, with wallpaper that peels in dreams and a light that never fully turns on.

I was eleven when the silence between my parents began to echo louder than their words. My mother would wash dishes staring into the backyard, and my father… well, he stopped coming home for dinner. They never fought. No shouting. No slamming doors. Just the slow, aching sound of love evaporating.

I’d sit at the dinner table alone some nights, chewing food I didn’t want to taste. My younger brother would play on the floor, too young to notice the cold air that had started to settle in the corners of our home.

One night, I opened a drawer to find an envelope addressed to no one. Inside were receipts, folded court documents, and one sentence scribbled in a trembling hand:

“He doesn’t get to take them.”

I didn’t know what it meant. But I knew enough to close the drawer quietly.

That was the night I started visiting the room. Not physically, but emotionally. A place I could go where things made sense—where pain had shape, and I could sit with it. Cry with it. Even laugh with it.

As I grew older, I kept the room hidden. Friends knew me as the one who always smiled. Teachers praised me for my writing. I told stories that made people laugh because laughter made the silence less terrifying.

But the room never left me.

Last year, I moved to a new city. New apartment, new job, new number saved under "Dad"—because after nearly fifteen years, he wanted to talk. We met at a park. He looked smaller than I remembered, like a statue eroded by guilt.

He said he was sorry.

I didn’t say anything.

The words felt trapped in that room, banging on the walls like moths desperate for a window.

That night, I wrote the room a letter.

You’ve protected me for so long,

But I don’t need you anymore.

I’m ready to leave.

And for the first time in years, I dreamt of a door.