The Threshold

The door frame holds its breath between two rooms, dust motes suspended in the knife-edge of afternoon. Here, neither in nor out, the light bends twice— once from the room we leave, once from the room calling.

Your hand rests on the wood worn smooth by other hands, other thresholds, other choices that felt both terrifying and inevitable. The hinge creaks its small prophecy. Nothing is waiting. Everything waits.

Across the threshold, the air tastes different— a thinning, a thickening, a name you can't quite remember but your body knows. The temperature shifts like a held breath finally released.

You step. The floorboard announces you. There is no return to the exact moment before this, no rewinding the hinge's small song. But there is this: the room receiving you. The light changing its mind.