The Shape that Wears Your Name

There is a corridor inside you

that does not end.

Doors bloom along its walls

like wounds that learned to open,

each one labeled almost,

each one breathing.

You walk it nightly.

Sometimes you meet yourself —

not as you are,

but as the echo

that arrived before you were born,

wearing your face slightly wrong,

smiling with borrowed teeth.

It asks why you pretend

not to feel the hooks in the air,

why you swallow oceans

and call it weather.

You try to answer,

but your voice exits through another door

and returns years later

as someone else’s grief.

The lights flicker.

Your shadow detaches.

It has been waiting

to live without you.

At the final door —

the one you never reach —

something knocks from the inside.

You are certain

it is hope.

You are certain

it is trying to get out