The Room With No Corners

I once stayed in a house that didn’t cast shadows.
Not because the light was perfect,
but because something inside the walls refused to let them gather.

It was on the edge of a town that doesn’t appear on maps,
north of somewhere forgettable,
a place with crooked vending machines and a clock tower that didn’t tell time.
Nobody lived there permanently.
People arrived.
Stayed a while.
Left a note.
Then vanished.

I hadn’t planned to go.
But the train doors opened,
and I stepped out without asking why.

—

The room I rented was small.
Futōn on the floor.
A desk with uneven legs.
One cup, one spoon,
and a window that faced a forest that was always almost raining.

But it was the mirror I remember most.
Oval. Hanging by a wire that hummed when the wind blew.
Every morning I looked into it,
and every morning it showed me someone else—
a version of myself I’d buried quietly beneath achievement,
smiled away in polite conversation,
and buried under to-do lists that never questioned why.

The man in the mirror didn’t look sad.
Just tired.
Like he’d been waiting for me to say something honest for years.

—

The Stranger Who Knew the Weight

On my third night there,
I met a man in the hallway.
Or maybe he wasn’t a man.
He didn’t blink when I did.
Didn’t breathe when I did.
He simply stood there, hands behind his back,
watching me like I was an echo that had finally returned.

“You carry it wrong,” he said.
“Carry what?” I asked.
He tapped his chest.
Then his head.
Then his back.
“All of it,” he said. “You carry it like it’s against you.”

And just like that, he was gone.
The hallway remained.
But the shape of it shifted,
as if it had just remembered something I hadn’t.

—

How Darkness Can Push

The next morning, I wrote like my fingers belonged to someone else.
Pages poured out,
not from inspiration,
but from pressure—
like something inside had been holding back a flood
and finally cracked open under the strain.

It wasn’t beautiful writing.
It wasn’t even good.
But it was true.
And that made it holy.

I realized then:
the thing I’d been running from—
the grief, the rage, the strange fatigue that followed me like a second skin—
it wasn’t here to stop me.
It was here to fuel me.

Not to drown me,
but to deepen the water I was meant to swim in.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Bruised Vessel

I didn’t leave that house with answers.
But I left with strength.
Not the kind you show off.
The kind that hums quietly under the skin.

The kind that understands:

• Some weights aren’t meant to be dropped. They’re meant to be lifted differently.
• Demons don’t always destroy. Sometimes they steady your hand.
• Beauty lives not in the absence of pain, but in the motion it creates.
• Not everything that haunts you is here to harm you. Some things stay because they remember who you were before you forgot.

—

I still dream about that house sometimes.
The way the floorboards spoke in sighs.
The tea that tasted slightly of sleep.
The mirror that no longer lied.

And sometimes,
on days when the world feels too sharp,
and I wonder if I’ve made any progress at all,
I feel something press gently against my spine.

Not to push me down.
But to help me lift
what I could never carry alone.

And I remember—
not all darkness is empty.
Some of it
has hands.