The quiet door

I'm not writing this to change anything. I want to say that first, so the rest can be honest.

Years. That's how long I've been holding a door open in my own head with your name on it. I called it patience. I told myself I was being good at waiting. It was not patience. It was a room I built and then sat in alone.

Here's the part I can't say out loud, and I'm putting it on paper because my mouth won't do it: I still want you. Not the idea of you, not some younger version I can romanticize. You, this week, as you are, with the life you picked that doesn't include me. I wanted to be the one you came to. I have wanted that for a long time, and I have never once said it to you plainly, which is its own kind of cowardice.

And I want to hate you for it. I can't manage that. You never asked me to wait, you never promised a thing, so there's no villain here, and the years are mine, built alone, on a hope I made up and then kept feeding.

That's the thing that gets me at three in the morning. Not that you didn't choose me. That I never made you a real question in the first place. I stood in the doorway waiting to be picked and called it devotion. It was a way of never hearing no.

So this isn't a clean ending. I don't have one. I'm writing because it has been living in my chest for too long and it needs to be somewhere other than in me. You don't have to answer this. I'm not asking you to, and I'm not setting a trap where silence means something.

I'm choosing myself, and I don't want to dress that up as a win. It's just the truth: I'm tired, and I'd like to spend whatever's left of me on something that has a chance of coming back.

I hope you're well. I mean it. It's the hardest line in this letter.

If someone came to mind while you read: tell me who the letter is for, and one true thing about them. The first lines come back written, free. [email protected], no account needed.