The Door Will Always Be There.

I have tried to close it, hammered it, nailed the plywood boards across the frame, let the wood swell with rain and time. But the hinge remembers me, and the gap remembers the light.

It sits ajar more often than not, a patient thing that keeps its memory of our laughter and its scars from the fights. I am not cruel enough to make the wall out of stone, I am not foolish enough to leave it so wide open that the same careless winds can blow through and erode everything again.

Before you come back, before you push that door wide enough to walk through and carry your swagger back into the rooms we once shared, promise me one thing: That you remember. Not the smooth polished version you tell yourself in the darkness of sleepless nights, but the small, honest truths. Remember where you left me and why the space between us grew the way it did.

Do not imagine I left because I wanted adventure or had a sudden change of heart. I stayed. I stayed through mornings that tasted like old coffee and apologies. Through dinners eaten in companioned silence, through forgotten birthdays and small disasters, the laundry piles and the tender ridiculous rituals that make up real life. I gave what I had, what I could. but every time you turned away; every time you chose the easier thing, the quieter convenience, the distracted scroll over the conversation. You pushed me a little farther. Not with a single dramatic exit, but with a slow persistent nudging: the missed calls, the misinformation, the half promises, the opportunities to tend to what mattered that you let pass like autumn leaves. At First it seemed small. Over the moments it became an ocean.

If you knock on the door and plead for what was, I will listen. I am not unkind. My heart remembers the good with a tenderness that aches; it is the part of me that held on the longest. But remember this; what you hope to reclaim is not necessarily what you lost. Don’t mistake the hollow of my absence for an invitation to erase everything that happened. What you didn't say. What you feel now, the nostalgia, the sudden ache in the silence of 3 am, may be sorry for the image of us, for the comfort of having someone who knew your rhythm. But the thing that was left was not the image; it was what you refused to keep alive.

Love is not a thing that survives on memory alone. it is not a photograph you can retreive into focus. it is a living work; it needs tending, watering, listening, time. When love was soft and small it survived on your attention; when it grew it needed more. It will not flourish if the hands that claim it have been practiced in neglect. You had every opportunity to tend to it; to notice the small frays and stitch them back to whole, to take my hand when I reached. But your choices were a series of small absences, some louder than you think. That accumulated neglect became the reason I learned to stand apart.

So please, if you return, bring with you more than regrets and promises made in the dark. Bring change. Bring the muscles of presence, the habit of turning toward instead of away, the willingness to be inconvenient for the other person, the humility to ask and to hear, and the courage to act on what you hear. Not because I want to punish you, but because my heart deserves to be kept as carefully as it once kept you.

There will still be tenderness. I will not love any less than I Loved; there is an endless, stubborn part of me that remembers the way you laughed, the small, ridiculous things you did to make me smile, the nights when we built dreams on cheap wine. That part of me Is a compass that always points to what was beautiful between us. But love is no more a blank check than it is a guarantee. There are rules now - quiet boundaries that are the map of what it will take to come close again. I am not the person who sits and waits to be chosen back into life without a different pattern. I have learned how to protect the parts of myself that were frayed by your clumsiness.

Do not be surprised; the boards are stacked beside the door. There are nails and a hammer within reach. They are not there to spite you. They are a gentle, practical promise to myself; that I will not become available for harm again. They are the line I draw between what I will allow and what I will not. They are the reminder that loving me requires effort - not grand gestures that evaporate, but daily acts that build trust: Showing up, speaking truth, carrying the small burdens and joys together. If you return to once again only take and not give, those boards will be set back in place. If you return with a new humility and a sincere commitment to change, you will find the hinge willing to move.

Understand, too, that I am not asking for perfection. I do not expect you to be unscared. All of us carry small wars and weathered places. What I ask for is proof; patterns altered, habits re-tended, promises honoured in the weeks and months, not just in the heat of confession. Time will be my measure. Time is what you refused us before; Time is what will show me your constancy now.

If you come back and your voice trembles with regret, I will not close the door in your face. I will be standing in the doorway and listening. Because I remember how you used to make the world sing for me, and because I know the courage it takes to admit you were wrong. But do not ask me to hand your old life back as if nothing had been learned. Do not ask me to be the place where old patterns are recycled and put on display. I want something different, something more. I want care that is visible and steady, an affection that survives the small daily tests of life.

Let the memory of us falling apart, of me leaving, the way I was pushed be your teacher. Let it tech you that love is a living responsibility not a trophy to be admired from a distance or put on display. Let it teach you that absence can carve clarity; that I left because the balance of give and take tipped in the wrong direction and that returning requires you to flip it back.

So come, bring your apology if you have it. Bring your small, new habits. Bring the kind of listening that is an action as much as a softness. When you arrive, I will be there at the threshold; not naive, not vengeful; simply human, shaped by what happens and honest about what I now need. The door will open. The room will be warm if you are willing to warm it with more than words.

And if you’re not willing, if you are the same careful absence in a new costume, then know this: the boards will go up. I will lock the chapter with a different kind of peace: one that is not built from hope but from self-preservation. I will keep a quiet gratitude for what we had and a fierce protection for the life I have chosen to steward now.

The door is always there. The choice of how you approach is yours.