The morning arrives gently, but my body knows something before my mind does. There's a tension in the air, a quiet shift, as if the house has inhaled and forgotten how to let go.
I lie still, listening.
At first, it's only the soft hum of early light sliding through the curtains. Then—
a sound.
Faint.
Measured.
Footsteps.
Not loud enough to alarm.
Not soft enough to ignore.
They travel down the hallway slowly, each step deliberate, like someone trying not to disturb the day too soon. For a moment, I think I'm dreaming. But the sound repeats, steady as a memory, and something inside me tightens.
I sit up, my breath thin, my heart behaving like it knows the pattern of those footsteps. Like it has been waiting.
The air in the hallway feels different when I open the door—cooler, almost touched by someone else's presence. Dust floats lazily in the beam of light, swirling the way memories do when they don't want to stay forgotten.
I take a step forward.
The floorboards give a soft sigh beneath my weight, but they do not echo the earlier rhythm. Those footsteps weren't mine. And they weren't recent.
They feel like they belong to a time before this silence.
Before the distance.
Before I learned how to disappear inside myself.
As I move down the hallway, something shifts in my chest. Not fear—something softer, something more dangerous. Recognition.
Halfway through, I stop.
The sound comes again.
Not from behind me.
Not ahead.
From inside me.
A memory awakens—hesitant, blurry. A night long ago, when someone walked this hallway with a gentleness that felt like safety. The rhythm was the same: slow, careful, as though each step carried a question.
I swallow hard. I had forgotten the sound of being approached with tenderness.
But houses remember things people try to erase.
I reach the end of the hallway, facing the closed door I once avoided. It feels alive now, as if it has absorbed those footsteps, kept them safe until I was ready to hear them again.
My hand hovers above the door. I should open it.
But I don't.
Not yet.
Instead, I press my palm against the wood and listen.
No footsteps now.
Only silence.
But somehow the silence feels full—like it's holding everything I never said.
I exhale slowly.
Maybe the footsteps weren't meant to scare me.
Maybe they were only reminding me—
that no matter how far I drift,
some parts of my past keep walking beside me,
patient, steady, waiting for me to face them.
The hallway warms slightly as the sun climbs higher, and for the first time in a long while, the silence doesn't suffocate me. It feels like invitation.
I let my hand fall away from the door.
Not in surrender.
In readiness.
The house is quiet again. But I know what I heard.
And I know what it means.
Something is coming back.
Or maybe—I'm finally returning to myself.