Room 101 had a guest once.
Or maybe it was the room that was visiting him.
People said he carried a kind of silence with him —
thin, metallic, almost patterned —
the kind of quiet you hear just before a transmission breaks through.

He left no record, no imprint, no name.
Only a faint distortion in the hallway light
and a smell like rain on old circuitry.

Inside the room, nothing was out of place,
yet nothing felt returned to where it belonged.
The air tasted of a question no one could phrase.
The mirror refused to hold a reflection for longer than a heartbeat.

They say the door still shifts slightly when you walk past it,
as if adjusting itself to your shape,
as if remembering something it was never meant to.”**