Apartment 208 existed only once a year. 

My mother never called it Apartment 208. To her, it was simply the room that wasn't there. To her, it was simply the spare room at the end of the corridor, though our flat had no spare room and the corridor ended at a window overlooking the courtyard.

I first noticed the door when I was twelve. It had not been there the day before. It was a narrow, white door with a brass number screwed into it: 208. We lived on the second floor.

There was no 208 but I saw her walk out of the same room always a bit lighter on her birthdays

I asked my mother about it while she was cutting figs at the kitchen table.

"Figs," she had murmured years ago, rinsing dark, split fruit over the porcelain sink while the late-afternoon sun turned the tap water golden. "They don't bloom like ordinary trees. Their flowers hide inside themselves, sweetening in the dark. Every life ripens at once, even the ones you never picked."

At fourteen, I thought she was talking about the gnarled tree growing out of the courtyard bricks below. Then the doorbell rang at eleven seventeen that very night, and the first shadow stepped inside. By my twenties, the small living room was a crowded gallery of ghosts wearing my own face. By day, it was nothing more than the bare plaster at the end of our second-floor hallway, where the corridor ended abruptly at a tall, soot-streaked window overlooking the courtyard. But on the evening of my birthday, the air inside our flat grew dense with the smell of wet pavement, crushed lavender and burnt sugar. Time lost its rigid edges, and every girl I had failed to become found her way back through the dark.

They came carrying the tangible proof of their unlived realities: foreign passports stamped in purple ink, charcoal sketches, hospital identity bracelets, divorce decrees, a key to an apartment in Lisbon, and a crumpled receipt from a Prague café. Every object laid out on the scratched pine table seemed to whisper: Look what happened to me.

They did not speak of the life I was currently living of the quiet office, the modest salary, the stack of unread paperbacks on my nightstand. Instead, they passed memories across the room like bowls of warm, home-cooked food, offering tastes of paths surrendered.

The diplomat sat near the window, wrapped in a heavy wool coat that smelled of salt air and foreign train stations. She spoke of a city where rain fell warm enough to steam against office windows, telling me she had learned to say home in nine languages and meant something different each time.

Beside her, the painter leaned against the radiator, her fingers stained permanently at the cuticles with linseed oil and cobalt glaze. She remembered an autumn gallery in Berlin where her canvases sat in shadow for years before anyone paused to look. She was the risk I never took, the cold studio I was too afraid to rent, the hunger I chose to trade for security.

Near the sofa sat the mother, her cardigan smelling of talcum powder and warm milk. She told me what it felt like to hold a sleeping infant against her collarbone in the quiet hours before dawn, a life I had turned away from during a heartbreaking breakup.

Across the room sat others: a surgeon who hated the metallic smell of blood; a poet who published one brilliant book at twenty-two and spent forty years answering tedious questions about it; a college student with unbound dreams and a woman who had done nothing at all with her years.

"What did you do?" I had asked the silent woman when I was sixteen.

"Nothing," she shrugged. "Not everything has to become something."

I had disliked her immediately. At sixteen, I believed lives were measured strictly by what they accumulated.

The women never explicitly told me they were me. They didn't have to. I recognized the subtle physics of our shared nature. The diplomat hated small, crowded elevators; so did I. The painter drew left-handed; so did I. The mother slept with her left foot outside the blanket; as did I. The surgeon had a jagged scar across her wrist from a rusted bike chain at age nine precisely where mine sat.

Yet the divergence was staggering. The diplomat had a son who spoke French. The painter had never married. The poet had died at forty-six in a quiet room overlooking a bay. And one woman, the mother quietly revealed, had killed herself at twenty.

"What happens if I become you?" I had asked the diplomat once.

She looked at me with unbearable pity. "You won't."

"How do you know?"

"Because I never became you."

By twenty-two, I hated them. They made my own quiet, unformed existence look utterly insufficient. I was the uncarved block, the root that had not yet chosen which way to branch, paralyzed by the fear of choosing wrong.

Then, at twenty-three, she arrived.

She did not ring the bell or knock; she simply opened the door like she belonged. The room fell instantly silent. The diplomat stopped mid-sentence. The painter dropped her charcoal. The old woman who brought a jar of fig jam crossed herself.

She was perhaps twenty-three, wearing an oversized sweater, carrying a heavy canvas tote bag bursting with dog-eared, battered manuscripts marked up in red ink. She smelled of rain and cheap filter coffee.

She was the writer, who had never compromised, who had stayed in an unheated attic room writing until her fingers were numb, refusing to trade her wild dreams for peace of mind.

She had my mouth when biting the inside of my cheek to keep from crying, my mother’s habit of pushing hair behind one ear, and the small scar beneath her thumb, all painfully familiar. 

I stared at her bulging canvas bag. "Are those yours?"

"Twenty-three manuscripts.”

"Published?"

She let out a dry, quiet laugh. "No. Not one."

Something tight inside my ribs loosened. "You're not successful."

"No."

"Then why are you here?” 

She smiled. 

The diplomat slumped her poised shoulders; the painter tucked her hands away; the mother reached out toward the nineteen-year-old student sitting on the rug, who looked at the newcomer with pure betrayal.

In an instant, none of us were wise. We were all eleven years old again, knees tucked beneath a school desk, believing with absolute, fierce devotion that one single path could encompass everything we were meant to be. We saw in her the original root, the reckless heart from which every one of our branched realities had split.

Yet as we looked at her, we knew the truth: she failed. The unwritten law of the apartment took hold and the room began to break apart.

They had to leave

The diplomat stood first, smoothing her coat. She walked over, rested a cool hand against my cheek, and kissed my forehead. "Don't spend your life mourning the ports you didn't sail into," she murmured. "They exist because you were brave enough to imagine them."

The mother squeezed my hand, her palm warm and comforting. "You chose peace," she said gently. "Never apologize for choosing to be gentle with yourself."

The painter slipped a small, folded sketch into my sweater pocket, gave me a sad, knowing nod before stepping into the dark hallway.

One by one, the front door closed with a soft click. The faint lingering smells of turpentine, expensive perfume and baby lotion faded into the quiet air of the flat.

Soon, only she remained.

She sat opposite me, turning a plain silver band on her left ring finger.

"I always wondered if you were happier," I admitted, my voice dropping to a whisper against the vast silence of the room.

She looked at me, her dark eyes tired but astonishingly clear. "I wasn't," she said softly, pulling her worn sweater tighter around her hands. “I spent so many nights wondering if I was throwing my youth away for a handful of sentences nobody would ever read."

"But you were brave," I said, a knot tightening in my chest.

"I was just terrified of becoming ordinary," she replied, giving a faint, bittersweet smile. "Just as you were terrified of breaking."

"Did anyone read it?"

"A few people. A friend. A stranger on a train."

"Did it matter?"

"On the long nights," she smiled.

I felt the tears come hot, quiet, and unstoppable. "You aren't real," I choked out, trying to anchor myself to the floorboards of my actual life. "You're just a phantom of a choice I didn't make."

She nodded gently. "I was real. Just not to you."

She stood up, pulling her heavy tote bag over her shoulder, and walked toward the threshold.

"Wait," I called out. "If I had chosen differently—" I looked at the desk where the files from a job I hated rested. 

"You would still have lost things," she interrupted softly.

"Tomorrow," she added, her fingers resting on the brass knob, "don't spend another year grieving. Let her be."

She opened the door. Beyond it lay a blinding expanse of green and light—a railway platform in the rain, a sunlit kitchen, a cold sea churning against grey rocks, a room filled to the ceiling with books.

"Will you come back next year?" I whispered.

She looked back, her silhouette framed by a hundred different horizons. "Do you want me to?"

For the first time in my life, I hesitated. 

She smiled. "Then perhaps I won't."

The door closed with a firm, quiet click.

Morning came, sharp and pale. 

Apartment 208 was gone.

Downstairs, my mother stood in the kitchen, washing fresh fruit under the running tap.

"How many lives does a fig have?" I asked from the doorway.

Instead of answering, she placed a small, ripe fruit in my palm. "Cut it open."

I glided the knife down the middle. Inside lay a dense, velvet labyrinth of hundreds of tiny, pale seeds, tucked snugly into the dark flesh. Each looked identical to the last. None of them revealed which branch they had come from, or which tree they were meant to grow.

That afternoon, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the painter’s sketch. It wasn't a drawing of a tree, but a map. Fine charcoal lines traced roads leading away from one another—some ending at a cliffside, some disappearing into dark mountain passes, some looping infinitely back on themselves.

In the centre, written in a loose hand I could no longer recognize as my own, were four words: No way back home.

On the back was a date: my birthday, next year.

I folded the map carefully along its creases and tucked it deep inside my desk drawer. Then I opened my dark leather notebook to a blank white page.

I thought about the diplomat who spoke nine languages, the mother who slept with one foot outside the blanket, the painter with charcoal beneath her nails, the silent boy under the table, the woman who lived thirty-one years in quiet compromise, the poet who died young, the surgeon who hated blood, the woman who did nothing at all, and the girl who carried twenty-three unread manuscripts through the rain.

I could not decide whether they were warnings, ghosts, or promises.

I picked up my pen, pressed the point to the paper, and began to write anyway.

Outside, a heavy autumn wind moved through the courtyard, and something fell softly from the old fig tree, striking the windowpane. When I leaned close to look down at the sill, there was no fallen fruit — only a small, pale purple stain against the stone.

Like a fingerprint left behind in a hurry. Like a bruise fading in the sun. Like someone who had just left, or someone who was still on her way home.