🕸️ The Room That Refused to Forget Me

The door stuck the first time I tried to open it.

I pressed my shoulder into the wood, feeling it resist—as if the room had grown stubborn in my absence. Dust puffed around the hinges, and the smell hit me at once: old paper, damp fabric, and something faintly sweet, like forgotten summer.

Ten years.

Ten years since I last stepped into this room.

Ten years since I swore I never would again.

The air inside felt thicker than the hallway. Heavy. As if the room had been holding its breath since the day I left.

The window was still sealed by the same cobweb I remembered—the one stretched thin across the glass like a warning. The spider was long gone, but its architecture survived, catching the weak afternoon light. Threads shimmered like silver veins, delicate but persistent.

The web had always bothered me.

You used to say it was beautiful.

I said it was creepy.

You laughed and told me beauty is sometimes the things we want to avoid.

I stepped farther in. The floor creaked beneath me, a familiar complaint, a sound that tugged something deep inside my chest. My eyes adjusted slowly to the dimness, picking out shapes of objects I had forgotten but that apparently had not forgotten me.

The mirror.

The lamp.

The stack of notebooks you made me promise to publish one day.

I knelt beside them. The top notebook had warped with moisture, its pages rippling like tiny waves frozen in time. My handwriting peeked through the curled edges—small, cramped, anxious. I used to write about everything back then. Fear. Love. The future I thought we had.

I flipped a page and found the sentence I didn’t want to see.

"You said you’d stay."

I closed the book quickly.

Behind me, the window rattled. The web trembled slightly, catching a stray breeze that slipped through the cracks. For a moment, it looked alive—almost breathing.

“Don’t start,” I whispered. “Not today.”

But the room had always been dramatic.

My gaze settled on the small wooden chair near the corner. Your chair. The one you dragged in here when we decided this room would be “our thinking room,” though you mostly just drank tea and made fun of my poetry drafts.

The cushion was still dented in the exact shape of your body. Time hadn’t dared to erase it.

I sank into it slowly.

The air shifted again. Softer this time. Like a sigh.

The last time we were in this room together, we didn’t speak. Not really. You packed quietly, folding your life into neat rectangles while my words tangled in my throat. I watched you from this chair, trying to memorize the sound of you being alive in the same space as me.

And then you walked out.

And then I didn’t open this door again.

And then everything else happened too fast to rewrite.

A vibration startled me.

My phone.

An unknown number flashed across the screen.

Spam, probably.

But I answered anyway.

I don’t know why.

“Hello?” I said cautiously.

Silence.

Then a breath.

A soft, familiar kind of breath.

I waited.

If there was hesitation on the other end, I would have known that sound anywhere—

you always hesitated when you were about to lie, or love, or leave.

My chest tightened.

But then the automated voice began:

“Congratulations! You have been selected—”

I hung up and pressed the phone against my forehead, exhaling shakily.

I shouldn’t still be hoping it might be you.

Not after all this time.

Not after everything.

The web shivered again.

The room seemed to listen.

I stood and walked toward the window. My fingers brushed the delicate strands. They clung to my skin, stretching, resisting—thin but surprisingly strong.

Like memory.

Like grief.

Like all the things we pretend we moved on from.

I wiped the web away carefully, letting the pieces drift to the floor. Light entered the room in a sudden flood, warm and golden, spilling across the dusty surfaces.

The room looked smaller now.

Less haunted.

I took one last look—the notebooks, the chair, the silence that had held me too tightly for too long.

“Thank you,” I whispered. Not to you. Not to the past.

To the room.

For remembering so I didn’t have to.

Then I closed the door gently behind me.

This time,

it didn’t resist.