the hallway still exists

There are places that quietly disappear from our lives.

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We move away. Buildings are remodeled. Businesses close. Schools are torn down. Homes belong to someone else.

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And yet…

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They never really leave us.

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Sometimes all it takes is a certain smell, a photograph, or walking down a hallway that looks vaguely familiar, and suddenly you’re no longer standing where you are.

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You’re standing there.

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I’ve come to believe that memory doesn’t just live in our minds. It lives in places.

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Certain rooms become forever attached to the moments that happened inside them. They stop being architecture and become emotional geography. They become witnesses.

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That’s where the hallway still exists began.

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For me, the hallway in this song represents a place where something happened that fundamentally changed how I moved through the world afterward.

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Like many survivors, I spent years believing that healing meant someday reaching a point where those places no longer held power over me. But healing, at least in my experience, hasn’t meant forgetting. It has meant learning that I can walk through those memories without letting them define where I’m going.

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One of the reasons I wanted to write this song is because conversations about assault often focus — rightly — on women. But men experience sexual assault, abuse, coercion, and violence too. Far less often do they feel safe talking about it.

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There are many reasons for that. Shame. Disbelief. The expectation that men are always supposed to be strong. The fear that people won’t understand.

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Or simply not having the words.

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I know how isolating that silence can become.

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This song isn’t an attempt to relive what happened. It’s an acknowledgement that trauma has a remarkable way of attaching itself to ordinary places. A hallway. A parking lot. A classroom. A hotel room. A hospital corridor. A doorway.

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To everyone else, they’re just places. To someone who lived through something there, they become landmarks in an emotional landscape that can take years to understand.

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That’s why I wrote:

“the hallway still exists.”

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Not because I want to go back. Not because I’m trapped there. But because pretending those places don’t matter has never been what healing looked like for me.

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Healing has been learning that those places can continue to exist…

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Without continuing to own me.

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For years, I carried this story quietly. Not because it didn’t matter, but because I didn’t yet believe it belonged in the world.

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Then I watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate.

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Whatever people’s opinions may be about the events that followed, one thing stayed with me: I watched someone speak publicly about an experience they had carried for decades. I saw the vulnerability it required, the criticism it invited, and the extraordinary courage it took simply to tell the truth as she remembered it.

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Watching her speak didn’t give me my story. It gave me something I hadn’t realized I was missing: the belief that one day it might be safe to tell it.

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Looking back, I think that’s where this chapter truly began.

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Every voice begins the moment someone believes it’s finally safe to speak.

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If this song reaches someone who has carried a hallway of their own — whatever happened there — I hope it reminds you that you’re not alone.

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Some places become more than locations. They become witnesses.

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And sometimes the bravest thing we can do isn’t erase them. It’s to keep walking.

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-Troy