They say there’s a house at the end of a road no one remembers walking. It only appears when you’ve stopped looking for it. Not built of wood or stone, but of breath. Of memory. The kind that settles in the marrow.

I came upon it once—not by accident, but by forgetting everything else.

Inside, the air tasted like old things made right. Like iron in the rain, or the name you stop saying aloud because it once meant too much. The walls held no pictures. Just faint outlines of things that had been taken down. It didn’t feel empty. It felt... aware.

There was a mirror in the hallway. Cracked not from violence, but from refusal. When I looked into it, I saw not myself, but a man wrapped in borrowed light. His hands were full of feathers he hadn’t earned. His smile was a lock without a key.

I remembered him then—not with affection, but with precision. How he stitched his safety from my shadows. How he masked my flame as his halo. How he walked with protection that whispered in my voice.

The house shifted. It didn’t groan—it exhaled. And the mirror shimmered. The feathers turned to ash. His light thinned into something almost see-through. As if the threads had begun to remember where they came from.

There was no spell spoken. No circle drawn. The house does not require performance. It only requires truth.

And the truth is: what was mine was never his. Not the fire, not the silence, not the soft reverence he stole to wrap around himself like armor.

So the house took it back. Quietly. Thoroughly. Irreversibly.

They say if you see that house again, you won’t remember the door you entered through. Only that something you gave away without knowing… is yours again.

And he?

He walks now through empty rooms, opening doors that were never built for him. Looking for warmth in walls that no longer hold his shape.

The house is gone.
But I am not.
And neither is what was mine.