The Architecture
of Regret

The room was drowning in heavy, slow, white smoke, as if it were wrapping around everything to protect us from the outside.

I lay beside her, the drugs playing with my perception, turning this narrow space into an entire universe of safety. She turned to me. Her eyes were wide, gleaming with terrifying sincerity in the dark. She took my hand and, very slowly, placed it on her stomach. Her body was so warm. She said in a faint voice, like a sacred secret: "Here will be your child."

Those four words didn't just cross my ears; they dug a deep foundation in my chest. In that moment, under the influence of the euphoria, I saw an entire future being built before me in this place.

We needed something, so I had to go out and buy it. I put on my coat, left her in that bed, and walked out. The cold street air didn't wake me; instead, it made my steps feel lighter. I took out my phone and called her. I heard her calm voice coming through the speaker.

I told her: "I will be a little late." And I hung up.

Halfway there, I stopped. Something inside me, perhaps an overdose of hope, or just a childish desire to cling to that moment, pushed me to turn back. I didn't want to be late. I wanted to see her face when I returned early, to surprise her, to rush back to that warmth and to that sentence still pulsing in the palm of my hand.

I climbed the stairs in absolute silence. I made no sound; I wanted the surprise to be perfect.

I slowly inserted the key into the door. A slight twist, silence, and the door opened.

I stepped inside, but something in the geometry of the place had broken. The room was still drowning in smoke, but the composition of the air had changed. It wasn't my scent, and it wasn't hers. I looked at the floor... there was a strange sneaker thrown haphazardly near the entrance. A dark jacket I didn't own hung coldly over the edge of a chair.

Time stopped. The drugs that had been lifting me to the sky minutes ago began to harden in my veins like shards of glass. The quiet in the apartment wasn't quiet; it was a heavy, charged silence, pierced by muffled whispers and strange movement coming from the bedroom.

I stepped forward with numb feet. I stood before the ajar door. I looked through the narrow crack.

The scene wasn't loud; it was deadly quiet, which made it all the more grotesque. Intertwined shapes in the dark, strange breaths, and stolen movements that sucked all the air from my lungs. I no longer saw the girl I had left moments ago; I only saw a stranger occupying the space that, until seconds ago, meant everything to me.

"Here will be your child." That sentence didn't just echo in my head; it shattered like glass breaking inside my skull. And in that exact second, the chemistry of my body flipped. I took one step back. I wanted to escape, just one step away from the door... but my foot didn't land on wood.

The sound of my shoe scraping the floor was a hollow metallic ring. Cold and harsh. I looked around, gasping for air, but the room was mutating. The warm walls surrounding me began to shrink, closing in to choke me, their paint peeling away to become panels of dead, gray steel. The dim light from the window evaporated into thin air, replaced by a pale red light, throbbing like a bruised vein directly above my head.

I raised my eyes to the door I was standing in front of, but I could no longer see the bedroom or the girl. The wooden door melted, turning into two massive iron sliding doors.

Then... the floor gave way.

It wasn't a metaphorical feeling; it was a violent, physical drop. My stomach rose to my throat, and gravity abandoned me in an instant. Cold air rushed up from below, and a muffled vibration began to rattle my bones. The room was no longer an apartment... it had become a metal box suspended in the void.

I am now in the elevator.

The steel doors in front of me slammed shut with a sharp clash. I looked to my right in this suffocating darkness, and I found the phantom of my mother standing still, a silent shadow of a safe choice I should have made but didn't. I turned to my left, and the phantom of that girl stood with the same coldness, a final image of the betrayal that had pushed me into this well.

The pressure built in my skull. The noise of the steel cables deafened me. I tried to breathe, but my lungs refused to respond. I couldn't bear this weight. The entire system collapsed. Everything sank into absolute blackness, and I fell onto the icy metal floor, unconscious.

I don't know how much time passed while I drifted in that nothingness. What woke me wasn't a sound, but a sudden stillness. The violent vibration had stopped.

I opened my eyes with difficulty and lifted my heavy head from the cold metal plate. I looked up at the red illuminated numbers above the door. It blinked steadily, indicating the "Penultimate Floor". The steel doors slid open with a sharp screech... and I found no walls.

I found the street.

The cold night air slapped my face. The sidewalk, the streetlights, the asphalt road. I stepped out of the metal box with stumbling steps. Tears burned my cheeks, and a fierce regret gnawed at my chest. I was dragging the weight of the betrayal with me on this familiar sidewalk, completely lost... until I caught sight of him.

Someone walking on the other side of the street. Approaching lightly, holding a phone to his ear, talking. I narrowed my eyes to make out his features under the dim light of the pole, and my breath caught in my throat.

It was me.

My old self. The version still floating in the cloud of false hope. It was the moment I was making the call, the moment I was saying: "I will be a little late."

I was certain I was fully conscious. The air was real, and the pain was real. All that consumed me in that moment was a frantic, primal urge to change the catastrophe. I wanted to protect him. To protect myself.

I ran. I sprinted toward him with all my might, screaming inside with all the desperation in the world: "Go to your mother! Please, go to her and don't look back... do not go back to that apartment!"

I reached him. The moment he raised the phone to say those cursed words, I reached out and struck his shoulder with all my strength to stop him. But... nothing happened.

My hand passed right through his shoulder as if I were striking smoke. Here, I realized the first law of this world: I am nothing but a ghost in my old architecture. I can see how the mistake was built, but I cannot tear it down. I stood frozen in place, watching this fool wearing my face utter the sentence that would destroy his life: "I will be a little late."

He hung up, and took his first step away from me, heading back toward that apartment.

I stood rooted to the pavement, watching my own back fade and dissolve into the darkness of the street. I watched him approach the building door. He took out his key. At that moment, when the metal touched the lock and began to turn, a black terror crawled from my stomach to my throat. It wasn't sadness; it was pure, feral fear. I was terrified of seeing the reality. A genuine dread of having to watch that door open, to see my soul shatter all over again. My mind couldn't bear the thought of reliving those horrific seconds.

I stumbled backward, shutting my eyes tightly. This fear wasn't just an emotion; it was the pickaxe that tore down the scene. As soon as the terror took hold, the street beneath me cracked open. The door evaporated, and the air pulled away.

Fear had evicted me from this world. The steel walls materialized around me in fractions of a second. I was back in the elevator. The vibration returned, and the two phantoms were beside me again, plunging deeper into a new station.

The elevator stopped. The steel doors slid open for me to step out into the new world.

Here, I found no cold streets. I found a shining facade. This was the world where I decided to accept what had happened, but in my own way.

I looked at myself in a glass reflection. I was someone else. The broken features had vanished, replaced by a relaxed and polished face. I had changed my name and my style. I became an attractive version on the outside, yet as barren as a graveyard on the inside.

In this world, I was surrounded by good girls offering me love and warmth. One of them was sitting with me now, looking into my eyes with absolute sincerity, trying to mend the ruin inside me. But I was smiling at her with that charming, dead smile.

I had accepted reality by becoming the executioner myself. I used their honesty as cheap painkillers to forget my old wound, and the moment one of them got close to touching my real heart... I would hurt her. I stabbed them with coldness and extreme selfishness, just to prove to myself that I was the one in control now.

I stood there, looking at the tears of the girl in front of me after shattering her with my harsh words. I thought I had won. But, in the depths of that moment... fear crept in once again.

I looked into her crying eyes, and suddenly, I no longer saw my strength, but my brutality. I feared this monster I had turned into. A true terror washed over me from this black void in my chest that swallows the souls of others and never fills. I was terrified of seeing my own hideous truth.

And the moment this wave of fear consumed me, the geometric glitch repeated. The weeping girl's face evaporated. The shiny floor caved in beneath my feet, instantly turning into a cold metal plate. The elevator swallowed me harshly once more. The doors closed, and the red numbers flashed, plunging me downward.

The metal doors opened for me to step into the third station.

In this world, I was living with a girl who loved me with terrifying honesty. A girl who gave me safety and trust. But I was programmed to destroy beautiful things. One night, the scene repeated itself... but this time, I was on the other side.

I looked at her and told her a very familiar lie. I said to her coldly: "I'll be a little late."

I took advantage of her absence and brought another girl into our private space. But the past never dies. She wasn't late; she returned early. The door opened, and she stood right there.

My eyes met hers. All I saw was that horrifying brokenness, and her world collapsing on her head. I looked at her face... and I saw my own. I saw my old self that once stood before that ajar door.

I realized that I had turned into the monster that destroyed me. I had completed the cycle, applying the exact same pain with absolute precision to an innocent human being. Fear struck me like a thunderbolt. A sickening terror of myself and of this blood running in my veins.

I ran away. I fled out into the street, looking for a final refuge, a pure space to hide in. And there was only one person who represented a pure foundation for me: my mother.

I ran to her house. I walked in on her, breaking down, trembling with remorse. I fell at her feet and screamed in despair: "Why am I like this, mother?! Why do I destroy everyone who loves me? What is this flaw inside me that makes me repeat the same ruin?!"

My mother looked at me. Her gaze was not affectionate. It was a look weighed down by an old secret. She remained silent for a long time, before the words left her mouth as cold as a guillotine blade:

"Because you are not my son, Reda... and because you are a copy of your father. He did to your real mother exactly what you did today. He betrayed her, in the exact same bed, on the exact same night she told him: 'Here your boy will be'."

The moment she uttered those words, the world shattered over my head. I discovered that I was only following the cursed genetic map I had inherited.

The floor of the house caved in with a deafening collapse. The walls turned into cold steel. The elevator swallowed me again. The red numbers began to crash, tumbling past all the years of my life, plunging into the pre-birth darkness. For the first time, I stood in the elevator completely alone. The phantoms of the girl and my mother had vanished. I was descending towards the basement... towards the day the man and the woman who bequeathed me this curse met.

The metal doors slid open with their heavy screech.

I had grown accustomed to this elevator. I now knew that every shudder in it led me to the naked truth. I stepped out of the metal box to stand at the deepest point. The first world where the code of our collective destruction was written.

The room before me was faded. There stood a young man bearing my features... it was my father. And that woman in front of him was my biological mother. I stood like a ghost watching the scene replay in its entirety.

He took his coat and left. But he didn't go far. The same cursed instinct drove him back. He put the key in the door and opened it. My father stepped inside... then stopped.

I saw everything from the outside. I saw his shoulders drop, I saw him looking through the ajar door at the same bed, at my biological mother cheating on him. I watched him die standing. He didn't scream. The light died in his eyes, he turned and fled. In that silent brokenness of my father... my personality was written. Here the first brick was laid.

The scene of the apartment melted away. Now, I am standing in a cold street, in front of a gray building bearing a sign: "Orphanage."

My biological mother was standing there. She was holding me as an infant. I found not a shred of remorse in her eyes. She only wanted to get rid of this burden. She placed me at the cold door. She turned around and walked away without looking back.

I stood there like a ghost, looking at myself as a baby cast onto the cold asphalt, screaming for an embrace, finding only harsh walls. I saw how I spent my days breathing in loss. I saw the absolute absence of love, the incomplete love that left a black hole in my chest.

Everything was clear now. The betrayal that destroyed me, the cruelty I treated girls with... they weren't my mistakes. I was merely practicing what I had inherited. I had been suckled from the breast of betrayal and founded upon abandonment. I did not choose this dark path; I was the inevitable result of a genetic inheritance formed by flawed love and the original betrayal.

I was not engineering my own remorse; rather, I was living inside the building my parents had constructed.

I looked behind me. The steel elevator doors were still open, waiting for me. I am completely alone in this basement, face to face with my naked truth.

I stepped slowly back into the elevator. I turned to look at that abandoned child by the door one last time, before the metal doors slowly closed, sealing off this past forever, leaving me in this heavy silence.