"it's maddening."

I lost one of the most formative friendships of my childhood very abruptly at around age 14, and never got closure for it. As the grief over that experience grew into something that I didn't have the words to express at that age, I started having dreams.

I was running through a labyrinth of distorted, half-remembered rooms that I knew to either be in my childhood home, or my friend's house (which was right across from mine in the waking world when we lived on the same street). Furniture was never where it was supposed to be, the rooms were very oddly shaped and doors were often difficult to get to. But I had to keep running through this maze as fast as I could, because there was always the sense that I was running out of time.

Always, always in these dreams, I knew that he was somewhere in the labyrinth. And if I could just get to him, everything would be okay. Everything would go back to the way it had been. We would be kids together again.

I never found him. I always woke up right as my hand touched the doorknob of the room where I knew he was waiting.

And it's all I could think about while watching Backrooms for the first time, how this endless labyrinth of distorted memories could be a metaphor for grief that you can't fix or outrun. But always thinking that the nightmare could end. That if you just run fast enough, if you just find the right door, you could fix it all. You could find [redacted].