Sign-In
Cart
The Parallel Room
Paperback
Publisher: Haris Alibasic
Published: Mar 30 2026
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.49
Height: 0.37 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What happens when the person you love disappears without explanation-and the imagined future you built together refuses to vanish?
The Parallel Room is a literary exploration of heartbreak as architectural collapse. It is not a recovery story. It is a meditation on what the mind builds when reality withdraws permission to love. After three months of intensity-late-night phone calls, shared meals, and love for vinyl records-she goes silent. No explanation. No closure. Just absence where presence had been absolute. I don't want to hurt you, she'd said. Then disappeared.
What follows is not grief in the conventional sense. It is the construction of an interior world-a parallel room where time waits, where conversations complete themselves, where the future that was promised continues to exist without her participation. This room is not a fantasy. It is an adaptive architecture. It is where meaning survives when reciprocity is revoked.
The Parallel Room approaches heartbreak with the rigor of not seeing it as something to overcome, but as a structure to inhabit with integrity.
The book unfolds across eighteen chapters and moves between:- The external world where the narrator functions-teaching, DJing electronic music, raising children-appears intact, while carrying futures with no destination.
- The parallel room where he speaks to her presence, not for reunion but for coherence.
- Dream sequences where memory, imagination, and potentiality fracture into infinite timelines.
- Real encounters-a woman who looks like her, a married woman at a soccer game, a DJ, who represents the possibility that he cannot trust himself to pursue.
The book examines what happens after intense intimacy is withdrawn without warning-what psychology calls love bombing and ghosting, but what lived experience recognizes as something more complex: the sudden erasure of a world that had already begun to exist.
- About the violence of sudden emotional withdrawal.
- About care given and not returned.
- But more than that, it explores what happens when heart, brain, and soul refuse to separate after loss-when they continue collaborating in absence, building interior worlds to house what reality expelled too quickly.
Written for those who:
- Lost not just someone, but a future that had already begun to feel remembered.
- Understand that some heartbreaks resist completion because meaning was never disproven, only denied.
- Recognize that moving on sometimes requires rehousing love in a different reality.
The prose is restrained, precise, and unsentimental. The structure mirrors psychological fracture-recursive, layered, resistant to linear resolution. Each chapter deepens rather than progresses. The book ends not with closure but with integration: the capacity to live fully in the fracture. If you've ever built a future in your mind only to have it revoked without explanation-if you've ever carried someone's absence like architecture-this book will recognize you without instruction and allow you to feel without being told what to feel.
For readers of:- Maggie Nelson's Bluets;
- Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation
- Ben Lerner's 10:04
Also from
Alibasic, Haris
The Post-Factual Polity: Ethical, Governance, Administrative, and Policy Crises in the Disinformation Era
Alibasic, Haris
Hardcover
Sustainability and Resilience Planning for Local Governments: The Quadruple Bottom Line Strategy
Alibasic, Haris
Paperback
The Post-Factual Polity: Ethical, Governance, Administrative, and Policy Crises in the Disinformation Era
Alibasic, Haris
Paperback
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1967-1972 (Loa #158): When She Was Good / Portnoy's Complaint / Our Gang / The Breast
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback