The Hallway That Grew Wings

Lyrics

The floor is polished like a question.
The light fixture at the end is a promise that recedes.
One step forward is one step back into the silver.
The wallpaper is a map of this corridor. Every floral print is a door I have already passed.
My shadow stretches, gets ahead of me, turns a corner that isn't there.
I run. The air gets thick, like breathing through wet pages.
The silence here has a sound. It's the sound of the exit being built one room farther away.
I'm walking on a mirror of myself walking on a mirror.
And the hallway kept stretching, a sentence with no period.
So I stopped. I held my breath. Pinched my nose until the knuckles were white.
And I breathed through it. Air, cool and impossible, filled my lungs.
The walls around me sighed.
I know this state. This hum behind the world.
I hold up my hands to check. To be sure.
The reflection on the silver floor shows a hand with seven fingers. My own hand has six.
I blink. Five. Two of them are made of smoke.
I press my palm against the wall and the wall presses back with my own palm.
A figure walks from the vanishing point. It has my face. It waves. You wave back.
And the hallway keeps stretching, a sentence rewriting its own beginning.
So I stopped. Pinched my nose, a totem of bone and skin.
And I breathed through it. The impossible oxygen.
The walls around me sighed, and remembered something else they could be.
The sigh becomes a crack. Plaster dust rains down like fine salt.
The wallpaper peels back, not paper, but membrane. Silver, veined with circuits of light.
The right wall folds. The left wall folds.
A joint I never had screams behind my shoulder blades.
They are not walls anymore. They are instruments. They are wings grown from the architecture of the trap.
I think of a name, "Wednesday," and the left wing dips.
I think of escape, and they beat once. A silent thunder that shakes the mirrors.
There is no more floor.
There is no more running.
I am the hallway. The hallway is the flight.
The corridor ahead is a library of every choice.
I steer toward the one marked with my own name.
The one I haven't opened yet.