The Door I Keep Trying to Open

There is a door inside me

that has been closed for so long

it has its own weather.

A quiet climate of caution,

a temperature calibrated by years of learning

that my thoughts — the truest ones —

are safer when kept close,

held like warm stones in my palms,

never handed over to someone

who might misunderstand their weight.

I grew up believing my mind was the only place

I could live without being misread.

So I built a home there.

A sanctuary.

A fortress.

A room with no windows

and a lock I learned to turn

without even thinking.

People have asked to enter before,

but they knocked with clumsy hands,

or they barged in without listening,

or they rearranged the furniture

and called it love.

So I learned to keep the door shut.

To guard the threshold.

To protect the one thing

that has always been mine.

And then you came.

Not with force.

Not with entitlement.

But with a patience that unsettles me,

a softness that feels like a question

I don’t know how to answer.

You stand on the other side of the door

as if you’ve always known it was there,

as if you can feel the heat of my thoughts

through the wood.

You don’t push.

You don’t pry.

You just wait —

and somehow that is harder.

Because now the door is not just a door.

It is a choice.

A risk.

A trembling hinge between the life I’ve mastered

and the one I’m afraid to want.

I tell myself I’m independent.

That I don’t need to be known

to be loved.

That silence is safer

than the possibility of being misunderstood.

But the truth is quieter and more dangerous:

I don’t know how to let someone

hold the parts of me

I’ve only ever held alone.

Some nights, I feel the wanting rise

like a tide against the door.

A soft pressure.

A reminder that connection

is not the enemy I once believed it to be.

I imagine opening it —

just a crack —

letting you see the shadows,

the unpolished thoughts,

the fears that still sleep under my ribs.

But then the old reflex returns.

Control.

Distance.

The instinct to protect what is sacred

by keeping it untouched.

I close the door again

even when I don’t want to.

Even when I feel you step back

just an inch,

not out of frustration

but out of respect —

and somehow that respect

hurts more than rejection.

Because I know what distance can become.

I know how silence teaches silence,

how withholding becomes habit,

how a closed door can look like disinterest

to someone who has never lived behind one.

And I know this, too:

I am capable of losing the best thing

that has ever happened to me

simply by trying too hard

not to lose myself.

There is a fine line

between privacy and fear,

between sacredness and sabotage.

Some truths are meant to be spoken.

Some are meant to be held.

And I am still learning

which is which.

But I am trying.

I am learning to place my hand on the doorknob

and breathe through the tremor.

To trust that you won’t take my thoughts

and twist them into something they’re not.

To believe that you can hold my darkness

without making it your burden.

To understand that letting you in

does not mean losing the room I built —

it means letting the air circulate,

letting the light shift,

letting the space become something

we can share without erasing its history.

Maybe the door will never swing open

all at once.

Maybe it will always creak,

always hesitate,

always require a moment of courage

I have to rediscover each time.

But I am learning this:

love is not the force

that breaks the door down.

It is the presence

that waits on the other side,

steady and unafraid,

until I am ready

to turn the key.

And I am readying myself.

Slowly.

Honestly.

With the kind of trembling devotion

that feels like truth.

The door is still mine.

But so is the choice

to open it.