How will we ever get out of this labyrinth?
The walls breathe, folding in on themselves like paper pressed under time.
I walk barefoot on corridors I have walked a thousand times but the corners shift when I am not looking.
Mirrors stare back with faces I almost recognize -
the me I left behind,
the me I never wanted,
the me someone else invented.
Outside, the world moves linearly:
streets meet streets, rivers kiss oceans,
the sky has a horizon.
Here, there are only spirals,
doors that vanish when reached,
echoes that follow me even when I stop.
The labyrinth is patient.
It whispers:
Your choices made these walls.
Your silence built these halls.
Your forgetting keeps you here.
Yet in the loops, I find rooms
that smell of rain, of dust, of old books.
I sit. I wait.
I imagine an exit but perhaps there is none.
Perhaps getting out is not leaving,
but learning to wander with eyes wide open,
with shadowed laughter echoing in the corners,
with the wisdom of a thousand wrong turns.
The labyrinth hums,
and I hear it clearly now:
You are both prisoner and architect.
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