The blue room - a short story about isolation
- YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_oPB1fFRKo
- Original title :: Reading "The blue room" short story I wrote
Prot reads aloud a very short story he wrote that morning and published on protesilaos.com. It is not about a room but about the comfortable confinement people build for themselves - the refuge that protects by keeping you in place.
The story
The blue room draws you in and offers refuge. It diffuses noise so nothing outside disturbs you, and inside it days stop mattering: "what was shall be." Time isn't paused though - it keeps marking the body, so the mirror shows how late you have become. The room stores your records: a perfect score in some category, dreams that never materialized, adventures not embarked on, characters you never became.
Invisibility follows. When a single color is all there is, you don't appear no matter how hard you try; when you speak, people wonder how a building can have a voice and respond to their fear of haunted places rather than infer that someone is there. You are irrelevant in your invisibility, and the room absorbs it all with inexhaustible patience.
Its function is protection, and protection requires that you stay. It removes urgency from the routine - what you have is complete, it will suffice for a lifetime. Plans for tomorrow become aspirations for next week, then a date that stays elusive, hopes revised downward with pragmatic considerations woven in until a few of them end the story that would have developed.
The room professes love and desire for you alone, and being noticed even by a structure feels special. It has a logic that overrides your volition, entering the mind as a shapeshifter that becomes friend and lover whose name you keep forgetting. It questions your judgment: the door is right there, you can step outside whenever you want - and you jump back in, because without a plan you revert to default, working against a goal you never defined. It feels like standing while running.
The ending collapses the distinction: the blue room is you. It extends into a line that closes into a circle - no outside, no inside, no before, no after, only the everlasting presence of one hue, "the tyranny of one." You switch off the lights to stop seeing it, knowing it and you are the same.
Note
Prot considers the piece complete as written and needing no elaboration. The text is on his website at https://protesilaos.com/books/2026-09-15-blue-room/.