On the east wall of my bedroom, right behind the bed, a door sometimes opens that shouldn’t exist. Not every night — maybe once a month, always at random, always for just a few minutes, and I can never predict when it will happen. I’ve lived in this apartment three years, and the first time it happened was about a year ago, on a mid-winter night when the heating was also acting strange, as if there were some connection between the two, though I’ve never been able to confirm that.
I inherited the apartment from my grandmother, who lived here her whole life and never once mentioned anything strange about the east wall — not to me, anyway, though in her last years she didn’t talk about much of anything, and some days she’d just stand at the kitchen window for hours, watching the street, as if waiting for someone who was never going to show up. I kept most of the furniture, partly because I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out, and partly because freelance translating doesn’t exactly leave room for buying new things — the work comes in waves, some months are full, and some weeks the only sound in the apartment is the refrigerator humming, and I end up talking to myself just to have a voice in the room.
When the wall first started acting strange, I tried to find a rational explanation for it, because that’s simply how my mind works: first I assumed a gas leak was causing hallucinations, and I called the utility company, who sent someone out, checked everything, and found nothing wrong. Then I wondered if the building was just getting old, if some trick of light was forming in hairline cracks, so I dug up the original blueprints my grandmother had left in a tin box in the pantry — but on paper, the wall was exactly as plain and straight as it was supposed to be. No bricked-up room, no hidden door, just a flat brick wall that should have backed onto the stairwell, not another bedroom.
I had a friend, Eszter, to whom I once tried, carefully, half-laughing, to describe what was happening at night, because I felt like I’d suffocate if I didn’t tell someone. She laughed too, though not unkindly — more like someone who assumed it was a dream, or exhaustion, and she suggested I see a sleep specialist, certain it was just job insecurity and loneliness playing tricks on me. I didn’t push the subject, and I never brought it up with her again, because I learned there’s a difference between someone not believing you and someone laughing at you — the first I can live with, the second I never wanted to go through again.
I also had a younger brother, Tamás, who lived in another city, and we talked on the phone every week, though never about the wall, because I decided not to burden him with it — he already worried about me enough, living alone in this apartment, far from the rest of the family, and I didn’t want him thinking something was wrong with me right when I was trying to prove the opposite, even to myself: that I could hold onto my sanity through all of this, strange as it was.
At first I thought I was dreaming. The wall doesn’t shatter or crack, it simply isn’t there anymore, as if it never had been, and behind it is a room almost exactly like mine, different only in small details: the curtain pattern is different, striped where mine is floral, the spines of the books on the shelf are a different color, and the bed stands on the opposite side of the room, mirrored, as if someone had flipped the entire space. By morning I always convinced myself I’d only dreamed it, no matter how vividly I remembered it, no matter how precisely I could recall the pattern on the curtains.
It happened again three weeks later, and that time I couldn’t call it a dream, because I was wide awake — reading, lamp still on, when the book slipped straight out of my hands as the wall disappeared and the other room took its place, the same mirrored arrangement as before. I couldn’t even stand up; I just sat on the bed and watched the air between the two rooms start to shimmer, as if heat and cold were meeting along some invisible seam, and I heard a low hum too, so faint it was like listening to my own blood pressure, except coming from outside my body.
I didn’t dare cross over that night, afraid that if I stepped through, the wall might stay open forever, or just the opposite — that it might seal shut forever, trapping me on the other side, far from everything familiar. I just watched until it passed, and when the ordinary, solid wall finally returned, the cold sweat on my back was the only proof I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. For days afterward I watched that wall every night, lamp left burning, as if staying awake could somehow guarantee I wouldn’t lose control over it, but nothing happened, and the fear slowly gave way to something else — a strange, hard-to-admit anticipation that grew stronger every time too long passed without anything happening at all.
During those waiting weeks I started having odd dreams, not exactly about the wall, but circling something even harder to pin down. In one, I walked down a long corridor lined with doors, each one a slightly different color, a different carving, and I knew, without anyone telling me, that behind every one of them was another room, another life I could have chosen, had I decided differently at some point. I never opened a single one — I just kept walking, and the corridor never ended, and when I woke, my pillow was wet with tears, though I couldn’t remember why I’d been crying.
Another night I heard a voice in my dream that was my own, but coming from somewhere farther away, as if calling up from the bottom of a well, saying, “don’t forget me, once everything turns out well for you” — though I couldn’t tell who the words were meant for, me, or someone I’d once said the same thing to, in some other life. These dreams never felt as sharply real as the wall itself; they were more like hearing music through a neighbor’s wall, never quite sure if you recognize the tune or just want to believe you do.
I didn’t write any of this down in the notebook, not at first, because I was afraid that putting it into words would make it more real than it had any right to be. But I kept the dreams anyway, like small unsettling stones in my pocket, which I’d touch now and then just to make sure they were still there, and that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.
The second time, about two months later, I stepped through. The room was just as cold as mine, smelled the same as my own apartment at night — something familiar, yet strange, like my own perfume worn by someone else, shifted by a shade from what I was used to. A notebook lay on the desk, filled with handwriting that resembled mine but wasn’t quite mine — like someone who thinks the way I do, but isn’t exactly me, had written it, the slant a little different, the dots over the i’s placed with a different weight, as if the same hand had learned the motion slightly differently years ago.
Before I opened the notebook, I walked around the room, wanting to know what else was different, beyond the handful of small things I’d already noticed. A framed photo stood on the nightstand, showing a woman I didn’t recognize, her arm around my — or rather the other me’s — neck, both of them laughing at something I’d never find out. The calendar on the wall was still open to September, though it was already November on my side, and a few entries were written in unfamiliar names, plus one word, underlined: “dentist,” which struck me as almost comically mundane given what I was living through.
The door between the bedroom and the rest of the apartment was shut, and though my hand rested on the handle, I didn’t dare open it — I had no idea how much time I had left before the wall sealed shut again, and something told me that going too far might mean not getting back in time. My pulse pounded in my ears as I listened for footsteps elsewhere in the apartment, any sign that someone else was home — because if the woman in the photo lived there, she might be standing in the kitchen at that very moment, or asleep in the living room, with no idea the wall in the bedroom was wide open.
In the desk drawer I found old letters I didn’t have time to read, only enough to notice that the name on the envelopes was familiar — my grandmother’s handwriting, though on my side she’d been dead six years already. That was the first moment I truly understood that what lay beyond wasn’t simply another room, but an entire life, with its own history, its own griefs and joys, partly overlapping mine and partly not, the gap between the two measured out in exactly the size of a single different decision.
The last entry read: “If you’re reading this, then you’re the one who crossed over. For me, everything happened the same way, except for one decision I made differently back in 2019. I wonder which decision it was for you.”
I didn’t know the answer. Or rather — too many answers came to mind, too many moments where I could have chosen differently: a job offer I’d turned down because I was afraid of change; a plane ticket I never bought for a friend’s wedding, because I was short on money at the time; a sentence I never said to someone who later vanished from my life, and I still don’t know what would have happened if I had said it.
I spent days turning this over before I admitted to myself which decision the entry must have meant — because I knew exactly, I just didn’t want to face it. In March of 2019, on a Wednesday before dawn, my phone rang, and Dóra’s name lit up the screen, an old friend I hadn’t really talked to in years, just the occasional message back and forth, and I knew she was going through something hard, because she’d told me a few weeks earlier that her marriage was ending and she couldn’t find her footing anywhere. It was four in the morning, and I had an early translation deadline the next day, and I told myself that whatever it was, I’d call her back in the morning, since there was nothing I could do for her at that hour anyway except sit there half-asleep, listening.
No one called back on her behalf, there was no voicemail, nothing — the call simply cut off, and when I rang her the next morning, she didn’t pick up. Three days later I found out from a mutual friend that she’d been taken to the hospital that night, after a suicide attempt, and that she’d survived, but from then on we somehow drifted out of each other’s orbit, as if facing that night together was more than either of us could manage. The last time I saw her was at a mutual friend’s wedding, two years later, and we only nodded at each other across the room, nothing more, because I didn’t know what to do with the guilt that surfaced every time I looked at her.
I didn’t know if she was even still alive, and that, maybe, was the hardest part of the whole thing — that the question the notebook wanted an answer to wasn’t some abstract philosophical puzzle, but a real night I’d carried with me in every detail, one I’d never told anyone about, not even Eszter, not even Tamás. When I finally wrote the answer into the notebook, my hand was shaking, and the ink smudged slightly because I didn’t wait for it to dry, too afraid the wall would close before I finished.
The third time the wall opened, I decided to leave an answer in the notebook before the passage closed. I only wrote: “For me, it was a phone call I didn’t pick up.” I didn’t know if the other me would ever read it, or whether they existed in any sense I could understand, or whether I was just an echo to them, the way they were one to me.
The fourth time, six weeks later, the notebook had moved to a different spot on the desk, and a new entry was waiting for me: “The phone call. I picked up. Everything’s gone differently for me since then — not necessarily better, just different. The friend you lost is still here, in my life, but I lost someone else instead, someone you might still know. Strange to think how much one answered call can change.”
I started writing questions to them, hoping for answers the next time. I asked what the world looked like over there, whether the same news played, the same things sat on store shelves, the same people appeared in their life who appeared in mine. The answers came slowly, because the wall didn’t open exactly when I was waiting for it, and sometimes weeks passed with nothing happening, so our conversation through the notebook crawled along, fragmented, like two people corresponding across months without hearing back.
I learned the woman’s name from the photo too — Kinga — and that they’d been together four years, ever since the other me, after picking up Dóra’s call, had somehow rebuilt their life differently: they’d left translation work behind, the thing I still do, and trained as a librarian, because, as they put it, “I realized I needed more human contact, not less, and in a library at least I see the faces I’m talking to.” It was strange to read how such a small, three-in-the-morning decision could lead to an entirely different profession, an entirely different partner, an entirely different daily rhythm, while the furniture, the spines on the shelf, the pattern on the wall all stayed exactly the same, as if objects were more loyal to the past than the lives built around them.
They had a cat too, Morzsa, which I once tried to pet when I crossed over, but the animal hissed and backed away, as if it sensed I wasn’t quite who I appeared to be, or at least not entirely the same. That frightened me more than anything up to that point — not the wall, not the notebook, but the fact that an animal, purely on instinct, could tell the difference between me and the rightful occupant of that apartment, when a person probably never would have noticed, not without looking closely.
I asked the other me how they explained the notebook’s strange entries to Kinga, and the answer that eventually came back said they didn’t — Kinga believed it was an old, unfinished short story they never showed anyone, and that lie, if it even deserved the name, had turned out more comfortable than the truth, which no one would likely have believed anyway. I did the same: when Eszter once found the notebook on my desk and flipped through it before I could stop her, I told her it was a writing exercise, two fictional characters corresponding with each other, and she believed it, because why wouldn’t she — she was looking at my own handwriting on both sides, just styled a little differently.
We once tried to find out how closely the wider world matched between the two sides, not just our own lives, because we were curious whether the decision that split us apart had only touched our two families, or whether something had shifted on a larger scale too. I wrote down a few things I knew had mattered on my side in recent years — the outcome of an election, a well-known singer’s death, a major fire in the next town over — and asked if the same things had happened on theirs. The answer was mixed: the election had gone the same way, the fire had happened too, on the exact same night, but the singer I’d written about as dead was still very much alive on their side, and had released a new album the very month I sent the question.
That unsettled me more than any personal difference had so far, because it meant the large, impersonal world could branch too, not just our small decisions, and that maybe we hadn’t split off at a single moment at all, but continuously, imperceptibly, through countless tiny events no one could ever fully account for. I asked how many ways they thought two otherwise nearly identical worlds could diverge, and they wrote back that it probably wasn’t worth thinking about, because “once you start counting the differences, you never stop, and you forget to live the life that’s actually yours.” That might have been the wisest thing they ever told me, and I spent months trying to take it to heart, not always successfully.
There was another night when it was their turn to ask me for help, not the other way around — Kinga had fallen seriously ill, and the doctors who admitted her found a rare blood disorder the other me had never heard of, and they wrote to me, frantic, asking if I knew anything about it on my side, any treatment, anything at all that might help. I called a doctor I knew the next day, described the symptoms as if researching an article, and wrote down everything I learned the next time I crossed over, every treatment my acquaintance mentioned, in detail. Weeks later I learned Kinga had recovered, and the other me wrote: “I don’t know if your information helped, or if things just happened to turn out fine on their own, but since that day I think of you differently. You’re not just some curious mystery in the wall anymore. You’re family, even if we’ll never shake hands.”
I learned that the me living in the other room grew up in the same house, went to the same schools, but their parents divorced earlier than mine did, over some small decision that played out differently at a family dinner I also remembered, except in my version that dinner ended another way. I learned they have no sibling, because their parents decided not to have another child after they were born, while I have a younger brother I love deeply, and his existence suddenly felt fragile when I realized that in another version of the world, he simply isn’t there at all.
I asked them to describe that family dinner in detail, since I’d been there too, just with a different ending, and I was curious exactly where the two versions split apart. They wrote that our father — still our shared father, up to that point our pasts were identical — announced at dinner that he’d been offered a job in another city, and asked whether our mother would be willing to move with him. On my side, she said yes, though she always claimed afterward she’d only done it for the family’s sake, and never really forgave him for taking her away from a home she loved. On their side, their mother said no that same evening, and their father went alone, came home on weekends for a while, then less and less, and two years later they filed for divorce, quietly, without bitterness, because — the other me wrote — “they both decided it was better to be happy apart than resentful together.”
That sentence haunted me for days, because my own parents, who stayed together, were never really happy — they’d just gotten used to each other, like two people sitting side by side on a long train ride, no longer bothered by the other’s silence. I found myself wondering which had actually been the better outcome in my world — that they stayed for my brother’s and my sake, or that on the other side they split, and maybe both of them truly found what they were looking for. I never wrote that question down in the notebook, because it felt wrong to ask someone who hadn’t known our father as long as I had whether he’d ever regretted it.
On another crossing, once I’d settled into the routine of it — step through, look around, find the notebook — I caught something in the mirror standing in the corner of the room that stopped my breath cold. My own reflection slipped for a single instant, as if a third frame had been spliced between two others, a face that was mine but older, more lined, with gray creeping into the temples, and a tiredness in the eyes I’d never seen on my own face. The image vanished immediately, and the mirror showed my ordinary self again, but my heart kept pounding for minutes, and my hands shook so badly I could barely hold the pen when I tried to write in the notebook.
I asked the other me if they’d ever seen anything like it, and the answer came slowly, more than a month later, as if they’d had trouble bringing themselves to write it down at all. “Yes, once. I don’t like thinking about it. I think sometimes the wall doesn’t only open a door between the two of us — maybe it opens in other directions too. Forward, maybe. Backward. I don’t know for sure. Don’t look in the mirror too long when you cross over. I don’t either.” That was the first time I was truly afraid of what I was doing, not from the thrill of discovery but because I realized the world behind the wall might be far larger and less predictable than I’d ever imagined — not one room, not one other life, but something that might reach in every direction a decision could ever have branched, time itself included.
There was an occasion, maybe around the ninth or tenth crossing, when the wall stayed open unusually long — not the usual few minutes, but closer to half an hour, and I, driven by courage or more likely recklessness, opened the bedroom door and stepped further into the apartment, wanting to see how closely the living room matched my own. The sofa had different upholstery, blue instead of my brown, and the bookshelf held knick-knacks I’d never have bought for myself, though I recognized one of them: a small wooden spoon our grandmother — both our grandmother now, since from that point on she belonged to them too, out of a shared past — had carved for us as children, the same one I’d lost during a move, but which they, apparently, had kept.
That’s when I heard the front door lock click, and a voice, feminine and oddly familiar — Kinga’s voice, though I didn’t know it yet — calling out a greeting as she came home from work. My heart jumped into my throat, and I bolted back toward the bedroom, because I had no explanation ready for a stranger caught in the living room who happened to look exactly like her partner. The wall was still open when I got there, but I could feel it thinning, contracting, and crossing through in that instant felt like a door almost slamming shut in my face — I made it through at the very last second, the wall sealing shut right at my heels with a soft, sucking sound I’d never heard before and never have since.
For days afterward I didn’t dare sleep in my own bed, curling up on the living room couch instead, terrified that if the wall opened again while I was asleep and I didn’t notice in time, I might not make it back — or worse, that someone from the other side might cross over to me while I slept, and I’d never even know. That was the first time I truly understood that what I was doing wasn’t some harmless game between two parallel lives, but something that carried real danger, even if I couldn’t quite put into words what that danger was.
Before I fled back, in those few seconds I stood in the living room, I noticed something I haven’t been able to erase from my mind since: on the far wall of that living room, exactly where my television stands, the outline of a door was forming in the wallpaper, precisely the way my own bedroom’s east wall looks right before it vanishes. It hadn’t opened while I was there — just a faint, irregular line, like a crack, impossible to say for certain whether it was real or just fear drawing it into my vision — but from that moment on I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe we weren’t the only pair between whom such a wall opens, and that maybe their apartment held a third room too, a third version, who might have been looking at that very wall from their own side at that very moment.
The next time I could write to them, I asked if they knew there was another wall in the apartment besides the one in the bedroom, one that opened between us. Their answer was short, and somehow more guarded than I was used to: “Yes. But I’d rather not write about it. Some things are better left undisturbed, even once you already know about them.” I didn’t push, because I could feel something in their tone — or rather in the handwriting, which was blockier than usual — a caution that warned me there were things waiting past this point that neither of us was ready for. I never asked again after that, but every time I crossed over, I watched the door to the living room out of the corner of my eye, hoping, or maybe dreading, to catch that line in the wallpaper again.
Kinga, I learned later from a careful aside, had once mentioned hearing strange noises at night coming from the living room, like someone whispering, though whenever she got up to check, she never found anyone there. The other me wrote that they’d had to lie to her, claiming it was probably just the neighbors’ voices bleeding through the wall, and Kinga believed it, or at least acted like she did, because — as the other me put it — “there are things two people in a marriage would rather not dig into, when both of them sense the answer would be harder to live with than the question.”
For days after that close call, I didn’t dare sleep in my own bed, curling up on the living room sofa instead, afraid that if the wall opened again while I was already asleep and didn’t notice in time, I might not make it back — or worse, that someone from the other side might cross over to me while I slept, and I’d never even know it happened. For months after that nothing happened at all — no murmuring in the wall, no shift in temperature, none of that strange hum I’d always heard right before. At first it felt like relief, as though the danger had passed, but after a few weeks the relief curdled into something that hurt more than I expected: I started missing the wall, missing the notebook on the desk, missing the one connection in my life where I never had to perform anything, because the other side already knew exactly who I was without my having to explain a thing.
Seven months in, with still nothing happening, I started wondering if something had gone wrong over there, or if the other me had simply moved out, and whoever moved in after them would never find the notebook, never know their wall sometimes disappeared. That thought unsettled me more than almost anything else, because I realized I’d never once considered what would happen if either of us left the apartment — our whole connection was tied to a place, not strictly to a person, or at least not only to one, and if they moved, I might never learn what became of them, only that the wall would keep opening, now onto a stranger’s room.
Exactly a year and two weeks after the last crossing, on a November night, the same month it had all started, the wall trembled again, and there stood the other room, exactly as always — the notebook in its place, with a new entry that read: “Kinga and I went away for half a year, to her family, abroad. I couldn’t tell you, because you never gave me any other way to. I hope the silence didn’t scare you.” That was the first time I truly understood that their life kept moving forward independent of mine, on its own rhythm, for its own reasons I would never fully see, and that our correspondence was only a narrow window onto what they actually lived, not the whole of it.
The wall still opens sometimes. It’s always the same room behind it, but the notebook always says something new — as if the other me keeps writing too, answering questions I never asked out loud, only in my head, as if somehow they hear them anyway. Once I asked if they were happy. The answer, which arrived weeks later, said: “Sometimes. You?” I couldn’t give a clear answer, because the question turned out to be far harder than I expected, once I had to put it down on paper.
One evening, eight months into this strange correspondence, we came up with a test, because we were both curious whether time flowed the same way on both sides. We agreed that on a given night, at exactly midnight, we’d each write the current date in the notebook along with a random number we’d pick in our heads, just to see whether they matched, or at least came close. When I next crossed over, their number was 47, mine was 83, and the date was off by a day — Thursday on their side, still Wednesday night on mine — which proved nothing, only raised more questions, because if time wasn’t fully in sync, maybe the two worlds hadn’t even branched off at the same moment at all, maybe one had existed much longer than the other, and we’d only just stumbled across each other through some random crack that might never have existed if the building hadn’t been built exactly this way, in exactly this spot, facing exactly this way toward the eastern light.
There was a stretch when I tried to find a pattern in the openings, thinking that if I logged the times carefully enough, I might be able to predict the next one. I kept a separate notebook — not the one across the wall — recording the exact date and time of every crossing, the phase of the moon, the temperature in the bedroom, even what I’d eaten that day, just in case it mattered. I collected data for months, and when I finally had enough to chart it, I found no pattern whatsoever — the openings seemed completely random, at least from where I stood, and I had to give up any hope of ever controlling the process.
I also tried lying down in the exact same position every night, with the exact same thought in my head before falling asleep, as if some ritual might coax the wall into opening, but of course nothing changed, and after a while I found myself a little ridiculous — a grown adult performing superstitious routines over a phenomenon I understood nothing about, scientifically speaking. I once asked the other me if they’d ever tried anything similar, and their answer was oddly comforting: “Yes, I logged everything daily for a full year. Nothing. I’ve let it come whenever it comes, since then. Maybe that’s the whole point — that it can’t be forced.”
Once they wrote to me: “It’s strange to think we might not be the only two. If one decision created two paths, why would it stop there? It must have happened again and again, at every single fork — so how many of us are there, carrying the same name, the same face, never knowing about each other, because the wall only opens between the two of us, not between everyone?” I thought about that entry for weeks and never really answered it, because there was nothing to say, except that I wrote back saying I was glad at least they had found me, however many of us might be out there, behind walls we might never see.
The hardest request they ever made of me was asking me to look out for Dóra, if I ever crossed paths with her, because the other me had stayed in regular touch with her ever since, and said she was doing well now, had two children, and had opened a small flower shop on the edge of town. I tried looking for her, but on my side Dóra had moved away, her number had changed, and even our mutual friend had lost touch with her years earlier. I couldn’t fulfill the request, and that was the first time I truly felt powerless on my own side of things, as if the other me were simply better off, all because one early-morning decision had turned out differently for them.
The most painful discovery, though, had nothing to do with Dóra — it was about our grandmother. One night, when I crossed over, a recording was waiting beside the notebook — not digital, but an old cassette in an even older tape player I’d never have noticed if the other me hadn’t written a separate note telling me to press play. Our grandmother’s voice filled the room, sharp yet warm, with that same slight lisp I remembered exactly, the one I thought I’d never hear again, since on my side she’d died six years earlier. On the recording she talked about how proud she was that her grandchild — the other me, on their side — was training to be a librarian, and what a good decision it had been to end up with Kinga, because “finally, someone who’ll actually listen when I complain about the weather.”
It turned out that on the other side, our grandmother had only died two years ago, much later than on mine, maybe because she’d carried less stress over the years, or maybe it was simple chance that her body held out longer. The other me offered to copy over every recording they’d made of her through the years, knowing she’d left my side earlier, and that this might be the one true gift they could give me. Over three months, every time the wall opened, I took one more cassette home, and listened to it on my own player, crying, laughing, trying not to think too hard about the fact that this voice, however real it sounded, belonged to a grandmother who wasn’t quite the one I’d loved — only almost.
There was someone in my life during those years, a man named Bence, whom I dated for almost a year before he realized I was hiding something from him. He hadn’t guessed the wall, of course — who would — but he noticed I often lay awake at night watching the east wall, and that I’d go distracted for days whenever an expected answer didn’t arrive in time. He assumed I was thinking about someone else, and no matter how much I tried to reassure him there was no one, my lies — well-intentioned as they were, they were still lies — kept poisoning what we had. When he broke up with me, he said it felt like I was always standing in some other room, even when I was lying right next to him in bed, and that sentence landed so close to the truth that I couldn’t think about anything else for days, turning over just how right he’d been, without ever knowing why.
After that breakup I grew more cautious, and for a while I seriously considered stopping the whole thing — no more answers in the notebook, no more crossing over when the wall opened, just letting the connection dry up slowly, like a river no one feeds anymore. I wrote that intention down for the other me too, because I felt they deserved to know, before I vanished from their life. Their answer, which arrived weeks later, surprised me: “I understand, and I don’t blame you. But before you decide, think about this: who else in your life can you tell the truth to this openly, without being afraid they’ll laugh at you, or send you to a doctor? If there’s someone like that, leave me, and go be happy with them. If there isn’t, maybe think it over once more.”
I didn’t leave, in the end, because I had to admit they were right — there was no one else I could tell the truth to, and however much it hurt to admit, our notebook correspondence had become the one place where I never had to perform anything. That didn’t mean I’d given up hope of a real, flesh-and-blood relationship on my own side — a few months later I met a woman at a translation conference, and though it was still early to say what it would become, at least now I knew how to manage my nighttime distraction without hiding it from her completely: I told her I slept badly, and sometimes wrote when sleep wouldn’t come, which she, fortunately, accepted as an ordinary habit, not a mystery to be solved.
The woman I’d met at the conference was Noémi, and when, a few months later, I started seriously considering moving in together, I wrote it in the notebook too, because I felt the other me deserved to know, being the only one who truly understood what a step like that meant for me, after everything with Bence. Their answer was strangely cold, almost sharp: “Are you sure you’re ready for this? Or are you just doing it because you’re afraid of being alone, and I’m not enough for you?” I was hurt, feeling they were judging something unfairly, something they didn’t know enough about, and for a while, almost two months, I didn’t write back at all, even though the wall opened twice in that time, and both times I left only a curt line or two, nothing personal.
When I finally wrote at length again, I admitted how much their words had stung, and why I’d found them unfair. Their answer, which came quickly this time, as if they’d been waiting for the subject to come up, was an apology: “You’re right, I had no business saying that. I think I was jealous, ridiculous as that sounds to admit — jealous that you’re about to have someone who’s actually there beside you, not just a voice in a notebook, while I’ve existed to you that way for years already. I’m sorry. I’m glad for you and Noémi, if she makes you happy.” That was the first time I truly understood that our connection, strange and limited as it was, could be wounded and healed just like any other human bond, except the wounds and the apologies arrived on paper, weeks out of sync, which somehow made everything harder, because reconciliation couldn’t be compressed into an embrace or a glance, only into words that had to be read over and over to be sure of their meaning.
Once Noémi moved in, I faced a new problem I’d never considered before: I could no longer sleep alone in the bedroom, and if the wall opened at night, I couldn’t just get up and cross over without risking waking her. The first time this happened, a few weeks after she moved in, she was fortunately sound asleep, and I managed to slip out, cross over, and come back without her noticing, though my heart pounded the entire time at the thought of what might happen if she woke and found the bed empty beside the wall — or worse, saw the opening itself.
I talked it over with the other me, who advised me to choose: either give her some half-true explanation — sleepwalking, something I actually had been prone to as a child, which at least wasn’t a complete lie — or risk being caught one day and decide then how much to tell her. I went with the sleepwalking story, and Noémi, who happened to be a doctor, took it seriously, and for a while even wanted to send me to a sleep specialist, which I managed to talk her out of by telling her the problem had mostly resolved itself since we started living together, because — and this part was actually true — I slept more soundly now that I wasn’t alone at night.
That half-lie turned out more comfortable than I expected, but every time the wall opened with Noémi lying beside me, a new kind of anxiety crept in, one I’d never felt living alone: the fear that someday the two things I kept separate — this life and the other one — would collide, and I wouldn’t know which one I’d lose when it happened.
One evening not long after, Tamás dropped by unannounced, passing through the city for work, and I’d left the notebook I shared with the other me out on the table, not expecting company. I saw his eyes catch on it, saw him about to open it, and for a moment I let him, because I was tired of hiding it, and some part of me wanted, finally, for someone close to me to know. But at the last second I took it from him and told him it was just an old journal I’d rather not share, too personal. Tamás didn’t push, just said he understood, everyone has things they don’t want to share, and then he told me something he’d been keeping to himself too: that layoffs were coming at his job, and he was afraid he’d be affected, and that he hadn’t told our mother because he didn’t want her worrying for nothing. It struck me, thinking about it afterward, that we all have our own rooms sealed off by walls, even if those walls never vanish, never open onto rooms full of notebooks, only onto silence.
By the third winter, once we knew each other’s lives well enough that we were no longer strangers meeting through a random crack, we started marking the day I’d first crossed over — not on the exact date, since the wall never opened precisely then, but sometime around that point in winter, when the heating always acted strange, just like it had the very first time. On those occasions we left each other longer messages, not just answers to questions, but the kind of thing you’d share with an old friend on New Year’s Eve: what had been good that year, what had been hard, what we’d learned about ourselves that we hadn’t known before.
On our third anniversary, they wrote: “Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we both stepped through at the same moment the wall was open, and met in the middle. What would happen? Would we destroy each other, because two identical things can’t occupy the same space? Or would we just pass through each other, like two strangers in a revolving door?” We never tried it, because we were both too afraid the answer would be the former, and we preferred to leave the question as it was — a strange, faintly frightening thought experiment to entertain on a winter night, from a safe distance, without ever actually testing it.
The last time, the most recent time the wall opened, they left me this: “You chose well. Most of the time. But I’m glad that at least once, you did it differently than I did, because now I know both roads can exist, and neither is worse than the other, just different.”
I don’t know when the wall will open again, and I don’t know what I’ll write when I’m standing there next time, notebook in hand. But every night, before I fall asleep, I look at the east wall, and wonder if they’re looking at theirs right now too, with the same curiosity, the same hope that next time we’ll get to talk a little more — two people who branched off from the same single decision, now trying to understand, through nothing but a notebook, what the other road would have been like.
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