he begins to notice it first in the air: a subtle thickening, like the walls themselves are exhaling. a pulse beneath the floorboards, a heartbeat that isnt his. the visitor doesn’t move; he simply exists, patient, patient as the building stretches and swallows. the apartment tastes of him now, remembers him.
drawers open to reveal objects he never owned: a childs shoe he once glimpsed in a dream, a photograph of a street he never walked, letters written in his handwriting but in a language he cannot read. each item hums with familiarity, vibrating with pieces of his mind. when he touches them, a shard of thought dissolves: a memory, a hope, a fear. the apartment feeds quietly, politely, and he begins to feel himself hollowing.
mirrors betray him. his reflection becomes faint, blurred at the edges, until the visitor—pale, patient, smiling just enough—stands fully formed. his own face lingers as a shadow, a half-remembered echo, a fading photograph pressed against glass. he speaks to the visitor, but his words vanish before reaching him; the apartment listens, consumes, repeats them back in whispers that are slightly wrong, slightly altered, subtly accusing.
he sleeps, or thinks he does, and dreams the building stretching wider than walls allow. staircases spiral into themselves, corridors fold over like pages of a book, doors lead to rooms filled with himself—rooms that do not exist in memory, yet he recognizes every detail. the visitor moves freely here, sometimes touching a chair, sometimes opening a window that spills into an impossible sky. each touch, each step, consumes him more. he wakes to find himself smaller, lighter, more easily overlooked, as if the apartment is learning to need him less and less.
voices begin to arrive—not human, not fully articulate, but threaded through the walls. they murmur fragments of his life: mistakes, desires, confessions, idle thoughts. he tries to close his ears, but the walls hum, the floors thrum, and the visitor smiles, always patient, always waiting. he realizes the building is cataloging him, digesting him, and reshaping itself from the pieces.
he looks at his hands. they tremble. faintly, they seem transparent. he tries to speak, but his voice is swallowed in the air. he touches the walls, and they pulse, soft, living, eager. the apartment is tasting him now, stitching him into its geometry. the visitor leans close and whispers a secret in a voice that is his own—his life, his name, his past—then swallows it.
and in that swallowing, he begins to understand: he is becoming the visitor. he is becoming the apartment. the walls remember him, the floorboards remember him, the shadows remember him, but he remembers less and less. each day, he moves through corridors that no longer obey logic, touching surfaces that flicker between real and impossible, and the visitor, patient and eternal, continues to exist in a perfect, cruel harmony.
he realizes, too late, that escape was never possible. the apartment does not want to trap him, it wants to eat him, savor him, fold him into its being until nothing of him is separate. and in the silence of the corners, in the soft sigh of the ceiling, he feels himself dissolving, a slow absorption, a quiet erasure.
by the time morning comes—or the thing that passes for morning in this impossible geometry, he is gone. only the visitor remains. only the apartment breathes, full and patient, and somewhere, deep in the walls, the faintest echo of a man whispers: i was here once.