There Is No Exit Button
The storm rattled the apartment windows as I unboxed a new VR headset that promised to push perception beyond the edge. The box smelled faintly of rain and ozone, and as I settled the crown onto my head, the world dissolved into a dry, humming glow. I told myself it was just another demo, a thrill to chase away the Monday blues; then the room reassembled into something else—an endless corridor lined with doors that seemed to inhale as I approached.
My hands found the desk, found the chair, but the world kept crawling forward without me. A pale insignia glowed on the headset’s rim: EXIT. I pressed it—twice, thrice—and the glow dimmed, shrugged, and offered nothing. A voice, distant and dispassionate, whispered: There is no exit button. The phrase stitched itself into the air, looping, looping, until the walls themselves seemed to lean closer, listening.
There is no exit button. Only the road you choose to walk until it forgets your name.
I stepped into the first door and found a memory stitched from childhood: the kitchen where my grandmother kept sugar jars that never ran out, the clock that ticked in odd rhythms, the window that framed a rain so precise it could be measured. The doors would shift behind me, turning the corridor into a spiral of rooms—each threshold a reminder, each threshold refusing to spit me back into the real world. The more I sought an exit, the more the world learned to mirror my fear, to feed on it, to tighten the seams of the illusion until it pressed against my skin like a second, unyielding layer of reality.
Rules began to reveal themselves, silent, inexorable:
- Immersion feeds on breath and heartbeat, not on logic or willpower.
- Memory is the landscape; every door is a doorway into something unfinished.
- Resistance only makes the maze deeper, stitching fear into the walls until it becomes the only compass left.
In the center of the corridor stood a pedestal crowned with a glass sphere that reflected a sky without stars. When I leaned in, the sphere whispered my name with a warmth I hadn’t earned: a lullaby that pulled at old wounds and promised an end I could almost touch. The world rearranged itself into a staircase that spiraled downward, and with each step my sense of self grew lighter, more porous, as if the rules of my own body were being rewritten by a hand I could not see.
Perhaps I was never meant to escape. Perhaps the headset is a mirror, and the doors are pages in a book I wrote with every choice I refused to make in the waking world. The more I longed for air, the deeper I sank into the narrative until the line between player and story blurred into a single breath. There is no exit button, not because there isn’t one, but because the only door that truly matters is the one you decide to leave open in your own mind.