The Open Door

There was a door. It was not locked.

It was not conditional. It did not require anything.

It stood open the entire time.

Some people cannot walk through an open door.

Not because they are afraid.
Because the door is quiet.

And a body trained on pressure only trusts what pushes back.

Stillness registers as nothing.
Nothing registers as trap.

So the body finds the window.

The window costs something — glass, urgency, the ache of choosing to leave before being left. The window makes sense to a nervous system that has only ever known safety with conditions attached.

The exit confirms the story the body has been carrying: that anything easy was never real.

There was no pause between seeing the door and reaching for the window.

What the body felt,
what the body predicted,
and the story the body told itself collapsed
into a single motion.

There was no space to see it happening.
The body did not decide.

The pattern decided.

The fall is not an accident.

It is the only landing a body prepares for when it has never practiced arriving.

The door did not close.

But no one is standing beside it anymore.