FICTION – FOWC, RDP, 3TC

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Caught in the Heavy

The corridor stretched on like a memory he couldn’t escape—narrow, dim, damp with a cold that clung to the skin like breath on glass. Mildew, rusted metal, and aging wood tinged the air, a scent that settled into the lungs and whispered of long-forgotten places. Floorboards groaned beneath his boots, their brittle creaks echoing like old bones remembering how to hurt.

He stood in the middle of it all, unmoving. Not frozen by fear exactly—more like resignation. The kind that seeps in after the tenth mistake, the last apology, the moment you realize the story you’ve been living might never shift its ending. He used to think time would fix it. But time, he’d learned, doesn’t heal. It settles—like dust.

The walls pressed close with peeling wallpaper and old nail holes where lives once hung. He scanned them as if he might find his past nailed there, too. Maybe a younger version of himself in a photo frame, smiling with someone whose name he couldn’t say out loud anymore.

An unfortunate truth surfaced: he’d chosen this silence. No one forced him here. He pulled away. He locked the doors before anyone knocked. They called it being guarded—he called it survival.

On a crooked table sat a lone candlestick, melted to a stub. Its wax clung like a memory—dried, useless, but still intact. He reached for it absently, fingers brushing tarnished brass. Cold. Solid. Real. A reminder that even forgotten things still leave traces.

He wondered how long he’d been standing here. How long had he been waiting for the hallway to say something? But hallways don’t speak. They listen. They hold your silence for you until it grows too loud to ignore.

Everything around him felt heavy. His coat, soaked with damp air. His thoughts sagged with years of unanswered questions. Even his heartbeat felt labored, as if each thud carried the weight of something he refused to let go.

He closed his eyes and thought of the words he never said. The calls never returned. The glances he turned away from because he didn’t trust what he saw in them.

Regret was a slow grief, the kind you wear like skin. And the mind, cruel and calculating, was its favorite weapon. Not a blade, not a gun—just memory sharpened to a whisper that says, “this is who you really are,” when you least expect it.

Still, a thought rose unbidden through the noise—quiet, but firm:

We always try to overlook the past, because we can’t change it. But we forget the important factor about the past… the wisdom we gain from it.

He let the idea settle, warm against the cold inside him. Maybe that’s what he’d come here for. Not punishment. No escape. But understanding. A reckoning not with the pain itself, but with the lesson buried beneath it.

He didn’t move. Not because he couldn’t—but because this was the only place he could hear himself. This hallway wasn’t just a space. It was a mirror, a memory, a confessional.

A bulb overhead buzzed, casting him briefly in light—harsh, unflattering. His reflection in the warped glass at the far end looked like a man still mid-sentence, still caught between what he was and what he feared he’d never be.

Just enough light to prove he was still there.

Just enough to remind him that some corridors don’t lead out.
They lead in—and if you’re not careful, they never let you leave.