Atlas of Unlit Rooms

In the city that keeps its keys in the wind, I follow a corridor of thawing breath, doors sleeping in their frames like unsent letters. Light pools where my footsteps hesitate, a small tide feeling for a shore.

Inside one room, the wallpaper is a map of rain, rivers folding into the corner where a chair waits. A cup remembers a hand it no longer holds; silence is a bird that pecks at the windowsill and drags the crumbs of morning into flight.

The stairwell smells of iron and snowmelt, a narrow lantern stitched from fog. I climb past floors that once had names, past a bell that never learned to sing, past a mirror that keeps rehearsing my face.

At the top, the roof is a paper sky, crease after crease of blue-gray breath. I lay the night out flat and listen— it rustles like a coat on a hook, waiting for the body to return.