Rooms Without Doors

Rooms Without Doors

The house I carry inside me

has hallways like gentle throats,

swallowing one room into another.

---

No knobs, no hinges—

just thresholds that behave

like polite suggestions.

---

In the kitchen, worry boils

without a lid;

It fogs the window until the city

becomes a rumor of lights.

---

The living room hosts a couch

with the shape of my absence

worn into it.

The TV glows blue prayers

for people I don’t know.

---

In the bedroom, the clock keeps

It's quite choreographic:

two hands practicing rescue,

arriving late, arriving again.

---

I visit the study to file my heart.

The drawers accept everything.

But closure.

Labels bloom: ALMOST, AFTER,

WHEN I’M READY.

---

Some nights, the walls lean in

to hear if I am still a story.

They smell like rain in old books,

like names we didn’t keep.

---

I look for exits the way a seed

looks for the split.

There’s a keyhole carved into plaster,

an honest wound with no door to fit.

---

So I learn a carpenter’s patience.

I measure the hush,

Mark a rectangle where

Breath could widen.

---

With a pencil behind my ear,

I draw a doorway on the wall—

not perfect, but true—

and knock until the chalk remembers.

---

Then comes the soft demolition:

a handful of dust,

the cough of a hinge I invent,

light bargaining with the frame.

---

When the opening takes,

The house exhales.

Rooms keep their names,

But they stop keeping me.

---

I step through what wasn’t there before,

carry the house like a lantern,

and leave one wall unfinished—

In case tomorrow needs an exit too.