The Door That Shut Itself

The door shut itself and I didn’t hear the click until after it happened, and it’s strange how that sound keeps echoing in my throat like something dry and unhealed, the way a burn keeps remembering the fire that made it. I press my ear to the wood and it feels like I’m lifting a cross against the side of my head, the grain cold and hard, the silence heavy enough to bruise, and I wait for some sign, some small sound that might mean life still moves on the other side, but there’s nothing, not even air.

The room isn’t breathing; it’s a photograph that never aged, a moment sealed away in its own forgetting, curtains caught in mid-drift like ghosts of people who should have been there but aren’t. The windows are sealed too, tight and perfect, with dust and insects pressed between the panes as if they died trying to get out and found even death to be another kind of enclosure.

I don’t see your shadow anymore. I imagine it, the way the mind recreates the outlines of the thing it can’t touch, and sometimes I believe it’s you but I know it isn’t, it’s just memory bending the light. I stopped trying to turn the handle long ago. The metal still remembers the shape of my hand but it will not move.

I keep standing here anyway, not because I expect it to open, but because this is the only place left where I can still remember the sound of you calling for me from the tree, too high, your small voice breaking the air, and the way you jumped, and the way my arms caught you, that single moment when love and fear collided and I was still a father who could do something about it, before everything went silent again, before the door shut, before I realized that sometimes it shuts itself and never opens, not even for the ones who keep waiting