The neon architect overslept,
so the crayons held an emergency meeting
and passed the following motion:

1. Abolish right angles.
2. Install joy in load-bearing beams.
3. Replace all safety regulations with glitter.

Somebody wrote it down
on a magenta girder
and the building immediately
failed every inspection in town,
which made it officially DADA-compliant.

I step into the hallway of impossible oranges,
the floor made of leftover sunsets,
the ceiling a blue Monday
stretched to maximum anxiety,
and between them
stands a column of yellow
that insists on being called “hope
in high-visibility clothing.”

On the left,
a vertical parade of reds and purples
tries to remember whether it used to be
a bookshelf,
a waterfall,
or an unfinished Marxist lecture.
The colors argue among themselves:

— I am dialectics!
— No, I’m a nightclub!
— Shut up, we are infrastructure.

In the background,
a small green rectangle
serves as an emergency exit
for all thoughts that have read too much theory.
They slide down its edge,
whoosh into the open cyan sky,
and never have to choose between
Habermas and Foucault again.

The corridor bends, or maybe it blushes.
Perspective stutters:
stairs try to exist but keep turning into beams,
beams try to be serious
but keep giggling in gradient tones.
A violet column leans slightly left
because it once went to a protest
and never fully straightened up afterwards.

At the far end,
light stands in the doorway like a bouncer,
checking IDs:

— Name?
— Ich bin eine Frage ohne Objekt.
— Purpose of visit?
— To get lost more precisely.

The bouncer squints,
stamps my forehead with a yellow smudge,
and waves me in.

Inside the inside
(yes, there is always another inside),
a staircase of pink decisions
walks away from itself.
Each step is labelled:
MAYBE, MAYBE LATER, PROBABLY NOT,
WHO EVEN ASKED,
and suddenly
I’m on the landing of Unscheduled Feelings,
where an orange beam hums softly
like a fluorescent mantra:

everything provisional,
everything under construction,
no final version available.

Here the building remembers
it once dreamed of being brutalist concrete,
raw, grey, uncompromising.
But then one day
a child dropped a box of crayons
on its blueprint
and the planner misread the accident as command.
Now the structure refuses minimalism,
it wears color like excessive jewellery,
too loud for zoning laws,
too alive for austerity.

In a corner
where the blue turns almost black,
a tiny balcony hangs in midair,
just large enough
for one melancholy cup of coffee
and a very optimistic cigarette.
The railing is drawn in violet,
slightly smudged
as if someone leaned there too long,
thinking about changing everything
and instead changing nothing
except the angle of their regret.

Under my shoes,
the red floor pulses like a quiet disco.
There is music here
but it has forgotten its melody;
what’s left is rhythm,
a patient knock of time
against each surface.
The columns tap back,
syncopated like anxious hearts,
and the yellow wall,
unable to keep still,
starts to dance in rectangular waves.

I look for doors
and find only thresholds,
outlines of possibilities
where the painter stopped mid-stroke
to answer a phone call from reality
and never came back.
So the corridor loops gently
into its own echo,
a Möbius strip of “almost there,”
lined with magenta guardrails
for emotional safety.

At some point
(I refuse to specify when—
time is clearly not load-bearing here)
I realize the outside world
has shrunk to a blue rectangle on the right,
just a patch of sky
pinned like a postage stamp
to the architecture of indecision.
All schedules, emails,
and unread messages
are trapped in that blue piece,
buzzing faintly
like bothersome flies behind glass.

The building doesn’t care.
It stretches, yawns in orange,
arches in violet,
lets a streak of green slip through
like a joke that nobody ordered
but everybody secretly needed.

A sign appears,
hand-written in shaky black line:

“WELCOME TO THE SCHOOL OF TILTED DAYS.”

Curriculum:

– How to walk through wrong perspectives
without straightening up.

– How to build friendships
out of overlapping colors
instead of compatible résumés.

– How to fail your career plan
and pass your life in the same semester.

Final exam:
You must choose a beam,
paint it with your latest doubt,
and leave it there
as permanent structural question.

I pick the tall orange column near the center,
the one that looks
as if it secretly practices yoga at night.
With an invisible brush
I write one sentence along its spine:

may I inhabit my own angles,
even when they do not match the catalog.

The column shivers,
slightly shifts its hue,
and a small echo of green
appears at its base
like fresh moss on stubborn stone.

Graduation is immediate.
No ceremony,
no diploma,
just the sudden ability
to see every ordinary hallway
as a potential chromatic riot
waiting behind beige paint.

As I step back out of the picture
(remember: still not a pigture),
the corridor folds into a postcard
addressed to whoever I become next.

The stamp?
A tiny yellow square.
The message?
Only three words:

“Architect yourself, crooked.”