I Think I Want To Leave My Door Unlocked

I find satisfaction in locking my apartment door each night. The audible click ensures my safety and security, and the nightly ritual feels like control, although, I find it easy during the day to let the door shut behind me as I forget about locking it.

The ritual of shutting and locking doors has followed me into my relationships. 

I have shut the door on a few people in my life, under varying conditions and with varying intensity. I usually take pride in my ability to walk away from connections that no longer serve me. When relationships turn unkind, anxious, and manipulative, I gather the courage to close the door. Most of the time, it’s once I realize I settled for unreciprocated love for far too long. Rarely have I had to lock a door behind me, and only once have I bolted a door at the top. 

Recently, I’ve been tempted to reopen that door I shut, locked, and bolted.

I didn’t walk away from this door easily. I begged for change and gave second chances until I lost count. I dissolved my personal boundaries, and in doing so, became a version of myself I hope to never meet again. I cycled through methods of preservation. I tried loving harder, pulling back, starting over, the end result falling short of bringing us closer. My desire for love to work overshadowed my dignity and my values. The relationship became humiliating and gut wrenching and exhausting. 

Closing the door on this particular relationship wasn’t impulsive. Locking the door was a deliberate act, and it felt like reclaiming the part of my identity I lost in being consumed by another person. The click of the lock echoed my hope that a kinder love exists.

And yet, the strength of my choice has always been accompanied by a dull ache of the connection I now lack. 

There was a night, over a year after I bolted the door, when I slipped the key into the lock and rested my hand on the knob. 

I contemplated the version of my life where I started to turn - I must add - I wasn’t naive enough to ignore the undeniable truth of my reality: I no longer knew the person behind the door. I knew nothing about their life, just who they were at eighteen and the model of their parents' car I passed driving the summer after there was no more we or us. 

So, before I turned the knob, I called a close friend who understands the version of me now, not the naive seventeen year old girl who picked up every 2am phone call or responded to every paragraph text.

Her response remains engraved in my mind.

She bluntly told me: growing requires sitting in this discomfort. Growing doesn’t look like running back to closed connections for momentary relief in uncertainty. If I reopened the door when loneliness was banging on the other side, I would be jeopardizing the healing from months of choosing myself. 

That conversation stabilized me, and I am so incredibly lucky to have her.

But, time has been doing what it tends to do, blurring my memories, fading the blowup arguments and tear-filled fights and amplifying 5:00am drives to sunrise hikes and birthday trips. I can’t even remember if we discussed how I contemplated backing out of college in Boston, and choosing the school along the Carolina coast instead.

I wonder if he knows that’s where I wound up. I write this sitting on my favorite chair, with my dog in my lap, in my dream apartment overlooking the Ravenel Bridge.

I’ve tried to piece together why this relationship resurfaced in my mind so aggressively. Was it wearing the guitar pick he gave me around my neck, scanning the Spotify code on the back as I waited for a local band to start their set? (We went to so many shows together.) Was it sitting on Zoom, my dog at my feet, in the coffee shop of his college town that I never visit? (Likely the first time we’ve existed in the same vicinity in years.)

It took an eight mile solo hike in Switzerland to realize missing the person and missing the connection we had weren’t the same. I do miss the feeling I had with them. But the truth is, they didn’t “give” me that. The feeling came from me. If I felt it then, I’ll feel it again.

I am reluctant to admit I search for that feeling in everyone I meet. No one has matched his magnetism or has etched themselves into my brain in the same way. And yet, if you take anything away from this piece, let it be that missing a feeling isn’t a reason to go back.

Reopening this door is either an act of forgiveness, or a betrayal to the version of myself that was able to close the heaviest door of all and build a life beyond the love behind it. 

I thought, for a long time, there was victory in simply walking away. But, I think victory lies in resisting the urge to return to a knife just to confirm it matches the cut that has finally healed into a scar.

My belief in love is one of my greatest strengths and it’s also my greatest liability. I will always believe in change for the better. I believe certain connections are lessons, and others are chapters that remain unfinished. Most importantly, I recognize that my unyielding hope in possibility can romanticize what my reality once was.

There is no way to know this person changed.

What I do know is - I have.

So, for the time being, I’m choosing to leave the door shut, but unlocked, and far from any bitterness, hate, or fear of someone I once loved so deeply.