Hotel of Endless Corridors
The lobby smelled of rain and old velvet, a scent that made the hairs on my arms stand at attention as if a quiet audience watched from the walls. I handed over a ticket that wasn’t mine and received a key that felt warm, like a heartbeat pressing against my palm. The clerk’s face remained hidden behind a screen of glass and steam, and when the doors slid shut, the hotel exhaled. The corridors stretched out with impossible patience, doors lining the sides in neat, indifferent rows, as if the building were listening to a private confession and choosing which path to sell to me next.
From the moment I stepped onto the first carpeted hall, the sense of time bent. The lights hummed with a tired warmth, their glow pooling in corners that seemed to remember every footstep I would ever take. Turns multiplied as I moved; a door I had just passed reappeared farther down the hall, only slightly altered, like a memory wearing a different hat. The carpet patterns swam in and out of focus, and the numbers on the doors marched backward as if the building preferred to see where you had been rather than where you were going.
There were rooms that smelled of salt, rooms that smelled of smoke and sweetness, rooms that contained nothing but cold air and a single chair that never stayed empty for long. I listened to whispers that sounded like rain tapping on windows—soft, patient, almost polite—yet every whisper seemed to bargain for something I could not name. In one doorway, a child’s laughter echoed from inside, but when I pressed my ear closer, the room yielded only a quiet static of memories, as if the hotel kept a weather report for your unseen past.
Time here is a corridor you walk twice before you realize you never left.
At dusk the hotel offered a small, almost ceremonial checklist in the form of signs that appeared out of nowhere and then dissolved just as quickly:
- Always walk; never run, unless your heartbeat insists it is necessary.
- Doors may mirror your fears; choose a path that asks a question you can endure answering.
- Echoes are property of the hall; protect your voice, or it may be rented by someone else’s memory.
- Check-out is a myth; the building leases your remaining hours to the next guest who asks politely for mercy.
I found a window that wasn’t a window but a seam in the wallpaper, a glimpse of a different stairwell spiraling down into a quiet blue. The stairwell’s air tasted of rain and the first new day I ever believed in. I realized then that leaving the Hotel of Endless Corridors wasn’t a matter of finding an exit, but of letting a door fall shut behind me and accepting that some places don’t end so much as they fade when you turn the last corner with the courage to walk away for the last time.