I can't remember my name.
It's there—just beyond reach—like a song whose words I almost know but can never quite sing aloud. I don't chase it anymore. Names are slippery shadows, vanishing whenever I reach out too quickly. I stop trying.
The clock hangs across from me, quiet and still, its hands frozen in their endless vigil. I'm drawn to it, as if it holds the shape of my own waiting, my own lost time. The room is pale, washed in the soft light of overhead bulbs that hum with a steady drone. The walls are a warm cream, like milk poured into water. The air smells faintly of old paper and something clean but not fresh—like linen left in the sun too long, scrubbed and softened by years.
My chair is worn, fabric frayed at the edges, but soft in the spot where I sit. I don't know if it's been waiting for me, or if I've worn it down myself. The chair feels like a place I belong, even if I don't belong anywhere else.
I shift slightly and the chair sighs, the small scrape of fabric on floor catching my ear. I listen for other sounds—the faint murmur beyond the double doors, the hollow echo of my own breathing. There's nothing else here but this quiet room and the clock that doesn't tick.
I try to pull memories forward, fragments that flutter just beyond my grasp. A kitchen bathed in pale yellow sunlight. The smell of coffee. A laugh, maybe a woman's or a child's. The sound fades before I can hold it. A corridor stretching forever, wet concrete walls, a shadow that moves just beyond sight.
I don't know what's real anymore. Memories and dreams blur until I can't tell one from the other. Sometimes the waiting room feels like a place between worlds—where time itself forgets to keep pace.
The clock says 10:15, and it has for so long I think it might be broken. But when I glance away and back, it suddenly reads 10:17, skipping minutes like swallowed time. The stillness unsettles me more than any noise ever could.
I rub my temples, the dull ache pressing behind my eyes, a reminder not to push too hard. To chase too fiercely is to risk unraveling.
Then—a sound. A soft rustle of fabric. My eyes lift, expecting the door to open, someone to walk in. But there's nothing. Just the room. The empty chairs. The clock.
I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them, she's there.
Sitting across from me in the empty chair—where no one ever sits. She wears a pale blue dress, hair dark and curling softly at the edges, a single strand falling across her cheek. She looks past me, her gaze fixed on something I cannot see.
I didn't hear her arrive. The door didn't open. One moment the chair was empty; the next, it was not.
I stare, breath catching. My mouth feels dry. I hear my pulse thudding behind my ears. She shifts slightly, crossing her legs at the ankle, then the other way. For a moment, I think I see her lips move—a twitch, a whisper—but no words come.
I glance back to the clock.
It's moved.
Not just turned or tilted—but gone from the wall opposite me to hanging above the double doors at the far end of the room. The space where it once was stares back, empty and hollow.
I don't remember it moving.
And I wonder if anything here is real at all.
The moment I look away from the clock, she's there.
Not a sudden arrival — no footsteps echoing on the linoleum, no rustling of the door. Just the soft, impossible presence of her, like a half-remembered melody lingering in the air.
Her pale blue dress whispers against the empty chair's worn fabric. Her hair curls just so, a dark frame to a face that feels both strange and achingly familiar. I want to say her name. I want to reach into the fog and pull it out, but it slips away like smoke through my fingers.
She doesn't look at me. Her gaze drifts beyond the walls, beyond this room, to some distant point I cannot see.
I'm not sure if she's real. Not in the way a person is real — more like a shadow cast by memory, or a dream caught in the corner of my eye. But she's here. She is.
I want to say something — to ask who she is, where she came from, why she's here now. But the words feel heavy and meaningless in my throat. Instead, I watch.
She shifts slightly, crossing her legs once, then the other, a small movement that grounds her in the space. The faintest crease appears at the corner of her mouth — not quite a smile, but something close enough to warm the cold edges of this room.
I try to remember a time when she was here before. Maybe we shared a laugh, a touch, a moment in the sun. But the memory is just out of reach — a locked room in the house of my mind.
My heart beats faster. Or maybe it's just the echo of waiting, of time folding in on itself.
I glance back at the clock — still above the doors, still watching silently.
She looks up then, her eyes finally meeting mine for a brief second. In them, I see something I recognize — not a name, not a face, but a feeling.
A quiet longing.
And then, as suddenly as she appeared, she is gone.
The chair opposite me is empty once more.
Only the clock remains — silent, still, unchanging.
I swallow hard, trying to catch the fading warmth she left behind.
The waiting continues.
The chair is empty again.
I blink, trying to will her back, but the room only offers silence in reply. The faint hum of the ceiling lights buzzes low, steady — indifferent.
I feel the weight of the waiting settle back on my chest. It's heavier now, as if the room itself knows I saw something it didn't want me to see.
My eyes drift back toward the clock, and my breath catches.
It's not where it was before.
I know this because the wall it hung on is bare now — a pale patch where the paint seems to remember the clock's shape like a ghost's imprint. The clock hangs above the double doors at the far end of the room, its hands frozen in that same stubborn position.
I want to reach out, to touch it, to pull it back. But my arms feel heavy, like they're weighed down by years of silence.
I don't understand.
I don't remember it moving.
Did it move at all?
Or did I just look away for a moment and the room changed without me?
I rub my temples, the dull ache returning. The waiting has burrowed deeper now — a pit growing in my stomach, twisting with every breath.
I sit back, the chair creaking softly under me, and close my eyes.
I try to gather my thoughts, piece together what just happened. The woman — was she real? Or just a trick of the waiting?
Her eyes linger in my mind. That feeling she left behind — like a half-forgotten song that aches to be finished.
I open my eyes and stare at the empty chair opposite me.
Empty, like always.
The clock doesn't tick.
Time is still asleep here.
The room breathes with a quiet I can't name.
I sit, still, in my chair, feeling the weight of everything I can't hold onto pressing down around me. The clock hangs silently above the doors, indifferent to my gaze, unmoved by my thoughts.
I don't know if she was real. The woman in the blue dress. A memory? A hope? A part of the waiting itself?
Her absence stretches out like a cold thread through the room. I reach toward it, but my hands pass through air, empty and thin.
I think about names — mine, hers — but the thought dissolves before I can grasp it. Names are slippery here. They don't want to be caught.
Time doesn't move. It just waits.
And I am waiting with it.
I close my eyes, the silence folding into me like a soft, heavy blanket.
The clock's hands do not tick. They never have.
I wonder if somewhere else, in another waiting room, the clock moves.
But here, in this place where time sleeps, I am still.
Still and waiting.