I want to explain what happened. Not to justify it — I'm not sure it needs justification — but because the academic in me insists that unexplained phenomena should be, at minimum, narrated. So: here is a narrative.

I spent my career studying corridors. Not corridors as metaphors, not corridors as symbols. Physical corridors. The way they function, the way they affect people, the grammar they impose on movement and attention. I was good at this work. I published. I had a position. I had a garden I liked and a telescope I liked and a fountain I did not yet know was unusual.

At some point — I cannot determine when exactly — the research and the life became the same thing. This is not supposed to happen. You study the thing. The thing does not study you back. But the corridor did. It always does. I wrote about this in the book, in the early pages, before I understood what I was writing. "The corridor reads the person walking through it." I thought that was a metaphor.

I want to tell you that I fought it. I want to tell you that I tried to maintain the distance of a researcher. I did try. I observed, I noted, I resisted interpretation. But you cannot be a person who notices things and not notice that your fountain has the same temperature as your basement. You cannot be a person who studies space and not notice that your garden looks like a corridor from above. You cannot live in a corridor and call yourself the one studying it.

What I found in the basement — I will not describe it here, because I don't think description works for it. You have to go there. If you've come this far, I think you probably will. I think the corridor wants you to. I think that's what all of this is: a pathway, laid out for a specific person, at a specific time. And you are either that person, or you are accompanying them. Either way, you're already in it.