Sure! How about **"3:33"or The Door at 3:33"

"The Door That Only Opens at 3:33"

Genre: Fiction / Magical Realism

Theme: Regret, Choice, Self-Discovery

Word count: ~750

I first noticed the door on a night like any other—quiet, forgettable, wrapped in the blur of insomnia and stale coffee. It appeared precisely at 3:33 a.m., where there should have only been the faded wallpaper and a crooked bookshelf. A door, plain and wooden, without a handle. Smooth like it had been sanded by time itself.

At first, I thought I was hallucinating.

Stress can play cruel tricks on your mind when you're 32, single, working 60 hours a week, and eating more takeout than you’re proud of. But I wasn't dreaming. The door was as real as the coffee cup I dropped when I first saw it. The next night, it came back. And the next. Always at 3:33 a.m., always in the same place, and gone before morning.

It took me four nights to gather the courage to touch it.

The surface was warm. As my fingers grazed the edge, the door sighed open—not creaked, not groaned, but sighed—like something that had been waiting a very long time.

Inside was a room not unlike my own, yet unfamiliar. The lighting was softer, the air smelled of lilacs and fresh linen. A version of me stood by the window, humming a lullaby I didn’t remember knowing. She was barefoot, holding a baby wrapped in a sunflower-yellow blanket.

I stumbled backward in disbelief. She didn’t seem surprised. Just smiled and said softly, “You chose to stay. I chose to leave.”

The door closed before I could ask what she meant.

Night after night, the door opened to different rooms. Different lives. Different versions of me.

In one room, I wore an artist’s apron stained with paint, surrounded by canvases bursting with color. In another, I sat at a dinner table with a man I vaguely remembered from college—the one who asked me to move to Paris and chase dreams, not deadlines. In yet another, I was older, hair silver and wild, reading poetry to a room of young faces who listened like it mattered.

Sometimes, I was happy. Sometimes I wasn’t. But in every version, I saw a piece of myself I had long buried under the weight of practicality and fear.

I began to understand: this door did not offer escape—it offered perspective.

One night, I stepped into a version of me who never left her hometown. I lived in a quiet cottage, taught literature at the local school, and baked bread on weekends. That night, I sat with my father, still alive in this world, laughing over old stories and chess games we never finished in mine.

I cried when I came back. I cried for hours.

The door never judged. It never lured. It simply offered a glimpse into what could have been, had I turned left instead of right, said yes instead of no, fought harder, or let go sooner.

Over time, I changed—not by magic, but by mourning the lives I didn't live and honoring the one I still could.

I began painting again. Just little things—coffee cups, birds, the door itself. I called my sister. I let someone love me, even when it was uncomfortable. I started sleeping before midnight. But I always set an alarm for 3:30 a.m.

Not to escape. But to remember.

One night, the door didn’t appear. Then another. A week passed. Then two. At first, I panicked—had I lost it? Had it given up on me? But slowly, peace settled where the panic used to live.

Maybe I no longer needed it.

Maybe knowing I could be anything, meant I could choose who to be, here and now.

A year has passed. My walls are filled with color. My life still holds regrets, but no longer rules by them. And every so often, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I glance at the wall where the door once appeared.

It hasn’t come back.

But sometimes, I think I hear it breathing.