Thomas always knew he was perfect. Not in the way a child might claim to be the best at a game, but in a quiet, unshakable certainty that seemed to have settled into his bones since before he could remember.
They’d sit at the dinner table and tell him he could be anything, do anything, and when they looked at him, they saw a kind of magic, a promise of something extraordinary.
Thomas didn’t just believe it. He knew it. The world had been laid out for him like an open book, and he was its perfect protagonist. But in the back of his mind, there was always the question: What is it that I’m meant to find?
By the time Thomas hit his twenties, he’d earned everything society told him he should desire. A prestigious career. Friends who laughed at his jokes. Money that came in such abundance it no longer felt like something to strive for. And yet, when he sat alone in his penthouse apartment, gazing out at the city lights below, a strange emptiness gnawed at him. A persistent, elusive feeling that no accomplishment, no matter how grand, could fill. It was something deeper. Something that couldn’t be named. And the harder he searched, the more distant it seemed.
In the beginning, he’d brushed it off. Perfect, he thought. I’m perfect. I’ve always been perfect. Surely, the world was simply playing a trick on him. But that trick didn’t stop. It followed him like an insistent whisper at the edge of his mind, growing louder, more urgent. What am I missing? he would ask, but the question hung in the air like a ghost that refused to speak.
It was on a rain-soaked night, as he walked through the city streets in a fog of indecision, that he saw the door.
It wasn’t a door he recognized, not even in the usual places. It appeared suddenly in the alley behind a pub he’d passed hundreds of times, standing tall and dark against the drizzling rain. There were no signs, no handles, just a door framed in shadows, like it had always been there, waiting for him. In that strange way of things that feel both unsettling and inevitable, he approached.
As his hand touched the cold, smooth wood, a tremor ran through him. He hesitated, but only for a moment, before pushing the door open. The room beyond was so dark, so thick with shadows, that he could not see a thing. Yet, as soon as his foot crossed the threshold, the world outside disappeared. No rain. No street. Only a vast expanse of darkness. A sky, without stars. A silence so deep it pressed against his ears.
But then, from the void, a voice. It wasn’t a whisper, but a melody, haunting and familiar. “Thomas.”
He froze.
“You’ve been looking for something,” the voice said, not from one place, but all around him. “For something that’s always been here.”
Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. The voice seemed to know his thoughts, to read them like an open book. It hummed a soft, eerie tune, and he felt a presence growing beside him, just out of sight. His skin prickled with cold, and in the silence, his own breathing was the loudest thing he could hear.
And then he saw it. Or, rather, saw him.
Standing before him was a figure, the outline of a boy, but one who looked like he could have stepped out of a forgotten memory. He was young—too young—but the same age Thomas had been when he first thought he was perfect. His eyes glowed faintly in the darkness, sharp and piercing, but empty, as though they had once seen something too horrifying to understand.
“You,” Thomas whispered, but the boy didn’t answer. Instead, he raised his hand, and with it, the world around them began to shimmer, as though it were made of smoke, twisting and bending like liquid. Shapes began to take form—too quickly for Thomas to process—and suddenly, he was standing in a place he couldn’t recognize, a realm between places, somewhere in the world and somewhere out of it.
“This is the space between,” the boy said, and though his voice remained soft, there was something otherworldly about it now. “The place where things that should have been fall through the cracks. You’re searching for the piece of you that slipped through.”
Thomas looked around. The air was thick with memories—his memories, but twisted. He saw himself as a child, his hands dirty from playing in the mud. He saw himself at a family dinner, laughing with his parents. He saw moments he didn’t remember, parts of his life that shouldn’t have been there, yet they all felt… real.
“I was perfect,” Thomas said, his voice a fragile thread, barely clinging to his confidence. “I always knew I was perfect.”
The boy tilted his head, eyes narrowing. “You were perfect, yes. But you weren’t whole. And that’s what you’ve been searching for. The pieces of you that you lost in the wanting.”
Thomas took a step forward, but the ground shifted beneath him, swirling like quicksand. “What do you mean? What is this place?”
The boy smiled, a smile that seemed to stretch, unnatural, as the world around them began to blur even more. “This is where everything you wanted goes… when you don’t know what you need.”
The shadows began to consume them both, growing and twisting, until Thomas couldn’t tell which way was up. The boy’s figure flickered like a candle in the wind.
“Are you me?” Thomas asked, his voice trembling now, his mind unraveling at the edges.
The boy’s eyes glinted, as if he had known this question would come, but the answer was not what Thomas expected.
“No,” the boy said, his voice fading. “But I was what you were always afraid of.”
The last thing Thomas heard before the world folded in on itself was the boy’s voice, distant but somehow close, whispering a final riddle:
“Perfect is never complete.”