The Hallway

Don't tell anyone.

It's a memory.

It's a feeling.

It's a sound.

An echo buried in my head,
repeating
like a sixteen-year earworm.

I am in my kitchen
watching my family.

My children laugh at Dad,
covered in flour,
struggling to fold dough
into a bread pan.

The sun is shining.
The birds are singing.
Not a cloud in the sky,
except—

the one gathering
in my mind,
my gut,
my nervous system, until it
tears me
from this happy moment.

It drags me
through the refuse I left
in my wake
sixteen years ago—
replaying old pains,
old decisions,
old mistakes.

I walk a hallway whose doors
twist
and refuse to end.

Each one another year.

Each one replaying
in a broken loop,
another version of myself
I've long since
outgrown.

Another door.

I cringe.

Another door.

I wince.

Another door.

My eyes fill
with silent oceans,
made heavier
with every turn
of a knob.

Each door opens
onto another
almost-life—
one I buried alongside
the people
I hurt most.

Contrition
that nearly tore me apart
for promises made to others
on behalf of a child
before he could even breathe—

a child who taught
a new mother
which of those promises
could no longer be kept.

I leave each room carrying
one more stone,
one more name,
one more what if
balanced
upon my shoulders.

And with it,
I carry a flame,
small and tender
within my heart.

Its light
is my children
Its heat
is my remorse.

I house it
like a votive flame.

Blessed
and burdened—
I cannot tend it
without burning
my hands
on the fire.

And still,
I return to this hallway,
so many times now
that I know which floorboards
groan
under the weight
of my guilt.

Which doors
stick,
pushed closed by
the memories looping
endlessly behind them.

Which knobs
bite the palm
as I turn them.

And just as
the hallway, too,
begins to bend,
stretching
like a carnival mirror,

just before the floor
turns to quicksand—
before it swallows
another version
of me—

It's okay...I'm here.

It's a sound.

It's a touch.

It's a taste.

A communion so practiced
my body finds it
before my mind can.

A devotion so hard-wired
my nervous system
calms in reverence.

The hallway loosens,
its distortions slipping back
into the flat, plain plaster
of ordinary walls.

The swirling colors beneath my feet
grow still,
and solidify
becoming familiar
rug-covered floorboards
once again.

The smell of flour
and baking bread
curls
through the air.

Laughter returns
like melody
to my ears.

The kitchen returns.

The hallway waits.

And I am still here.
____________________

The Hallway is what happens when C-PTSD and accountability collide.

People often imagine healing as a series of straightforward steps, progressing until eventually you move on. For someone living with C-PTSD, it is rarely that simple. The mind latches onto the nearest what if, the closest almost-life, the rawest memory, and pulls us back into it over, and over, and over—even after we have grieved it, learned from it, and continued living.

This poem explores the sensory experience of C-PTSD, where memory is not a smooth-running reel but a hallway that loops endlessly through old versions of ourselves. But it is equally a poem about returning to the present. Here, love becomes the tether, and devotion the regulator, drawing us back to what is real when the past threatens to become the only thing we can see.

The Hallway is the second poem in a trilogy about accountability, memory, and learning that healing is not about evading guilt, but about quietly choosing—again and again—to return to the present, even while the past keeps calling us back.