(Between Rooms) The Door That Wasn’t Quite Closed

Coming back out of the bathroom with that soft post-mirror wobble still shimmying loose in the skullbones, hands slick and cool from the faucet’s cold kiss, breath steadier than a liar’s promise after staring down the stranger in the glass too long, and I take the wrong turn — just a lazy half-step drift, left when the map said right — and bam, the corridor bends like a bad riff, and the carpet fattens underfoot thick as slow molasses, and the sound thins fast, and the party drops away behind a wall of water, muffled, far-off, like the whole night’s been dipped in reverb and turned down to a blue murmur.

This hallway’s darker, quieter than a dead man’s trumpet, a whole other country, separate from the swing and clatter, and there’s a door, just ajar, that dangerous sliver of come-on, just enough for accident to slip in sideways like smoke off a reefer, and a thin gold blade of light slices across the boards, warm, secret, trespassing. Before the brain can yell cut, the sound hits, low first, almost nothing, then unmistakable: breath riding breath, mattress springs groaning their small complaint, rhythm too slow, too sure, too deep-down deliberate to be anything but the real thing, the private jam session nobody invited the hallway to.

I freeze, but the sound thickens, deepens, turns into wordless language, skin-talk, mouth-moan, that secret percussion of bodies locked in, knowing every lick, every hip-snap, every exhale like the changes in a head arrangement, and a woman’s voice breaks into soft shards — ah-uh-yes-no-yes — fragments never meant for corridor ears, never meant for strays like me, and a man answers back with grunt-laugh-gasp, ragged low, the bed underneath working overtime, creaking like an old upright trying to keep up with the tempo while they try to break the damn thing apart.

Heat rises weird, like the sound itself got fever, it crawls under the collar, prickles the neck, sinks hot into the chest cavity. The sharp little twist of knowing: outside something undeniable, something swinging with its own gravity, confidence, consent, full-on momentum, two cats locked in a closed circuit, finishing each other’s choruses with skin, while I’m out here in the dim, a ghost who forgot the gig ended.

I should move, my feet should lift, turn, scat, but the sound pins me another beat, then another. Beds got memories, walls got longer ones, etched deep. And that’s when Róisín slides in, not her flesh, not her heat, just the ghost of her, an absence that lands heavier than any touch could swing. Her laugh from earlier ghosts the skull, easy, bright, leaning by the window with that unhurried cool, unavailable in the most ordinary, heartbreaking key. Thought hits uninvited, needle-sharp: she ain’t here like this. Won’t be. Not with me. Not tonight. Not in the way those two behind the door are here, now, no brakes, no questions.

The rhythm shifts, the tempo climbs, and the bed answers louder — thump-thrum, thump-thrum — insistent, almost proud, like it’s laying down the backbeat for the end of the set. Something about that certainty, that closed loop of two people who don’t need the room’s permission, sharpens the want till it almost gleams clean. It’s not sex I’m chasing, not exactly. Not even her body in the spotlight, just the permission, the simple, brutal permission to stop standing outside rooms, to stop being the cat who listens while others blow.

And now the door sways a hair, just a draft maybe, or my own ragged breathing pushing the air, and guilt taps the shoulder, mild but firm, like an old sideman who’s tired of watching you miss the changes, so I step back, retreat down the corridor, slow heels soft on the thick pile, and the sound fades behind me, becomes muffled rhythm, then becomes nothing but the low metallic hum of pipes and the far-off bass pulse of the party I drifted from.

I find the main hallway again and the noise rushes back in like surfacing from deep water, where laughter crashes, where chatter swings, glass-clink chaos, all of it loud, careless, alive, and the party reclaims me with no questions asked, folds me back into the crowd, and I slip in quiet, carrying that small stolen moment tucked under the ribs like hot contraband, that knowledge of something real going down nearby, urgent, unscripted, without me in the lineup.

Somewhere deeper in the flat Róisín laughs again, clear this time, cutting through the din like a bell in fog, and the sound doesn’t hurt exactly, but it lands, settles, makes its home in the hollow under the sternum. Doors close somewhere down the line, music swells, horns and bass and heartbreak, and I keep moving through the rooms, a little more awake than I was before, a little more alone, carrying the echo of that ajar door and the rhythm behind it like a bruise I didn’t call for but won’t quite let fade yet.

Dalry Road is a book-length prose-poetry project set in Edinburgh, unfolding through long, rhythm-driven fragments that trace a city across night, memory, and movement. Neither novel nor traditional poetry collection, the book occupies a liminal space between narrative and lyric, where sentences stretch, loop, and accumulate like footsteps on wet stone.The text follows a wandering first-person voice moving through streets, bus stops, stairwells, and fleeting encounters in the hours before morning. Weather, light, and sound are not background but active forces: rain writes, streetlamps mutter, stone remembers. The city is experienced from within, not described from a distance, and language mirrors this intimacy through dense, breath-heavy phrasing and a jazz-like cadence influenced by writers such as James Joyce and Jack Kerouac.

Rather than telling a linear story, Dalry Road assembles an atmosphere. Past and present blur, faces recur in altered forms, and memory intrudes without warning. The fragments resist resolution, favouring repetition, drift, and sensation over explanation. What emerges is a portrait of urban consciousness at night—half-dreaming, half-alert—where walking becomes a way of thinking and listening.