After the Door
When I closed the door, there was no sound.
That felt strange. This old door usually creaked as if it wanted to wake the entire building. I paused for a moment, listening. Nothing. No sound at all. I didn’t think much of it — maybe I was just lucky today. I put on my shoes and walked down the stairs. I stepped outside.
Everything was the same.
The men playing backgammon in front of the corner shop.
The carpet hanging from the balcony above.
The taxis passing by.
“Excuse me…” I said to our neighbor. We greeted each other every morning.
“Yes?” he replied.
There was nothing in his voice. As if years of familiarity had been erased in an instant.
By then, it had happened too many times to ignore. My closest friends didn’t recognize me. And my father — the one who confused me the most — looked straight at my face and asked:
“Who are you?”
That was when I understood. This couldn’t be a problem with their memory.
I hadn’t been forgotten.
I didn’t exist in this world.
They found me that evening.
There were three of them. They spoke quietly, as if they had lost their voices long ago. They didn’t call me by my name — because in this world, I had no name.
“You passed through a door,” one of them said.
“Which door?”
“A door like yours. An ordinary one.”
They called themselves The Vanished. They said this had been happening for centuries. People would pass through a door at the wrong moment and slip into another reality. Here, they were not “meant to be” — they were excess.
“Is there a way out?” I asked.
The answer didn’t come immediately.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
They also told me about the Crusaders — people who believed we had violated God’s order, and who hunted people like me to kill them.
“But we’re just in the wrong place,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter to them.”
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I saw the Crusaders for the first time that day. I didn’t run. They wore black. There was no expression on their faces, no weapons in their hands. Still, death reached you before they did.
“You shouldn’t be here,” one of them said.
“I shouldn’t be anywhere,” I replied.
That night, one of the Vanished was killed.
By morning, there was nothing left.
No body. No blood.
Only a gap in memory.
That was when they told me the truth.
“Your time is over.”
“What did I do?”
“Nothing. Sometimes that’s enough.”
Then they showed me the reality.
Everyone who ended up in this world had one thing in common:
none of them were needed.
Some were a burden to society.
Some to their families.
Some were simply a burden at all.
“This world accepts those who are no longer necessary,” they said.
“It’s a landfill of discarded possibilities.”
That was why the Crusaders killed us.
They weren’t punishing us.
They were preserving balance.
That was when I understood why there was no way back.
Because going back would mean taking someone else’s place.
That evening, I didn’t stand in front of the door.
In this world, there was no home for me.
In the other, no space.
By morning, no one remembered me.
That meant the system was working.
