It began with a tremor in the wallpaper, a shy rearrangement of its arabesques, as though the walls, tired of their old geometry, had conspired to rehearse another. The lamp - a brass sentinel, dull by day but sly by dusk — acquired that peculiar tilt, the sort of inclination one sees in listeners leaning too close. And the shadows, those obedient stagehands of evening, started rehearsing steps of their own, too certain, too knowing, always half a beat ahead of me.

The floor spoke in fissures, splitting at certain thoughts as if it understood the weight of them. Even the air thickened, acquired weight, an invisible audience pressing against my skin. But the mirror — yes, the mirror was worst of all. Pale, oval, indecently attentive. For an instant, it withheld my reflection as though considering whether to return me at all — and when it finally did, it held its silence too tightly, like it knew more than it let on.

I should have confronted it then. Anyone else, braver, cleaner, would have done so — demanded its secret, peeled back its silence. But I did not. I could not. A cowardice — no, something more sordid than cowardice, a sickly refusal — pressed me down. To face it would mean to acknowledge what waited there, and I lacked that courage. Meanwhile the room grew hungrier, threatening in its patience, as though preparing to consume me whole. And there were nights — yes, shameful nights — when I pressed hurt into my own skin, a small rebellion, a proof of possession, as though pain might break the spell, interrupt the gaze, return me to myself. But the room absorbed even that, and I remained suspended, half-devoured already, sometimes catching the faintest shimmer of glass where none should be.

So I covered instead. I wrote. Words as wallpaper, sentences plastered across surfaces, flimsy layers to smother what stirred beneath. A page to distract the pattern, a paragraph to fix the lamp in place, a litany of lines to drown out the whispering corners. And once in a while, mid-sentence, I would feel the strange pause of something withheld, the way a reflection lingers just outside the frame. I buried the room beneath language, as though paper could absolve me, as though ink could erase what the mirror already knew.

But the performance persists. It always persists. You cannot silence a chorus by singing louder; you only add to the dissonance. And sometimes, between my words, the room blinks — like glass catching a secret light — a dreadful, tender reminder that it has not forgotten me. Linger long enough, look too closely, and there is the uneasy sense that something here is aware, quietly looking back.