THE DOOR I CHOSE

I don't remember the exact moment I fell in love with him. Maybe that's the problem with love. It doesn't always arrive with an announcement. Sometimes it slips into your life quietly. A conversation that lasts longer than it should. A look you think means something. A hand that stays in yours for a second longer. A person who notices you at a time when you have spent years feeling invisible. And suddenly, without realizing it, you have given someone a room inside you. You furnish it with hope. You hang memories on the walls. You leave the light on. And when they leave, you keep the room exactly as it was. Just in case they come back. I think that's what I did with him. I kept the room. Even when he stopped living there. Even when he made it clear that he didn't want the responsibility of having a key. Even when I knew, somewhere beneath all the excuses I made for him, that I was loving a person who had never really learned how to hold me. Still, I stayed. Or perhaps staying isn't the right word. I kept returning. There is a difference. Staying suggests someone asked you to remain. Returning means you keep walking back to somewhere that has already hurt you. And I was very good at returning. We were always breaking up. Then making up. Then breaking up again. It became our rhythm. Almost familiar enough to feel like home. That should have frightened me. Instead, familiarity comforted me. There is something deeply dangerous about being given pain in a language you already understand. You don't recognize it as danger. You recognize it as home. He could end things on a whim. One moment we were fine. The next, I was being told it was over. And every time, I would try to understand. That was always my first instinct. Understanding. Not anger. Not leaving. Understanding. I wanted to know what had changed. What had I done? What had he misunderstood? What had he misunderstood about me? What had I misunderstood about him? I would replay conversations in my head like a detective looking for evidence of my own crime. Maybe I had said something wrong. Maybe I had been too emotional. Maybe I had asked too many questions. Maybe I had expected too much. Maybe I should have given him more space. Maybe I should have been easier. I was always finding ways to make his behaviour make sense. He had been hurt before, I told myself. He had been burnt. Maybe he didn't know how to trust. Maybe love scared him. Maybe I needed to be patient. Maybe I could love him through it. That word again. Maybe. I have lived inside that word for longer than I'd like to admit. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe he'll change. Maybe she'll notice. Maybe they'll understand. Maybe this time will be different. Maybe if I try harder. Maybe if I love better. Maybe if I become the kind of person nobody could possibly want to leave. I didn't know then that you can spend an entire lifetime trying to become unforgettable to people who have already decided not to stay. I only knew that I loved him. Or at least, I believed I did. And perhaps I did. I don't want to rewrite the past simply because I understand it differently now. I loved him. I loved him in the way I knew how. Completely. Without a safety net. Without measuring what I was receiving against what I was giving. I don't know how to love in teaspoons. I never have. If I love you, I love you like an open palm in the rain. Everything exposed. Nothing hidden. I will give you the softest parts of me and hope you understand that they are not weaknesses. I will remember the little things you tell me. I will notice when your voice changes. I will know when something is wrong before you say it. I will defend you when you're not there. I will forgive you before you have finished explaining yourself. And that is beautiful until it isn't. Because an open hand is also an easy place to put things. People will put their problems there. Their loneliness. Their guilt. Their unfinished healing. Their secrets. Their excuses. Sometimes they will put their entire weight on you and then wonder why your fingers are shaking. I let him do that. More than once. He slept with people close to me. People who weren't supposed to be close enough to him for that to happen. My bloodline. Even writing that now makes something inside me tighten. There are betrayals that don't just hurt. They rearrange the furniture inside you. You begin to wonder whether your understanding of loyalty was foolish. Whether your heart was simply too trusting. Whether love really does endure everything, or whether that was just something I told myself because leaving was more frightening than staying. I forgave him. I found reasons. I always found reasons. Perhaps that was one of my greatest talents. I could turn someone else's cruelty into a wound I needed to understand. I could take betrayal and search for the childhood underneath it. I could take neglect and look for fear. I could take someone's inability to love me properly and somehow make it my responsibility to teach them. I didn't realize how exhausting that was. He would say we were exclusive. But sometimes it felt like the exclusivity belonged only to me. I was expected to behave as though I had made a lifelong promise while he seemed to believe the relationship came with an emergency exit. Whenever I asked what we were, he would say there was no need for labels. No need. I remember thinking about that phrase so many times. No need for labels. But I needed something. I needed certainty. I needed to know whether I was building a house or simply standing in somebody else's doorway. I needed to know whether I was his girlfriend, his almost, his maybe, his convenient person, or simply the woman who was always available when he wanted warmth. I don't remember him saying that he loved me. Maybe he did in his own way. Maybe there were moments that felt like love. But I don't remember hearing it. And when you're someone like me, someone who has spent a lifetime looking for proof that you matter, silence becomes very loud. Still, I stayed. I told him to stop breaking up with me on a whim. I told him it hurt. I wasn't asking for perfection. I wasn't asking him never to be angry. I wasn't asking him to agree with everything I said. I was asking him not to keep putting my heart on trial every time something became uncomfortable. He did it again. Of course he did. And this time, something in me became tired. Not strong. Not healed. Just tired. There is a difference. Strength is standing up because you know you deserve better. Sometimes exhaustion is simply your body whispering, I can't survive this again. So I tried to move on. I tried. That word matters. Because for the first time, I didn't immediately run back. I talked to other people. I tried to imagine a life where his name wasn't the first thing I searched for when I woke up. I tried to imagine sleeping without waiting for a message. I tried to imagine being wanted without having to negotiate for it. But my heart was still standing at his door. My body may have walked away. My mind may have tried to reason with me. But some part of me was still there. Waiting. Hoping. Listening. Then I went back. I crawled back, if I'm being honest. And he took me in. But then he found out I had actually tried to move on while we were broken up. And suddenly, I was the one who had committed some unforgivable crime. It was as if I had betrayed him. As if he had expected me to remain frozen in the exact position he had left me in. He could leave. I was supposed to wait. He could explore. I was supposed to remain loyal to a relationship he had already abandoned. He could walk through every door. I was supposed to stand outside his. And for a while, I accepted that. That's the part that embarrasses me. Not that I loved him. Not even that I went back. It's how little I believed I deserved in return. I was grateful for scraps. A message. A conversation. A little attention. A moment of tenderness. Anything. I would take whatever he gave me and build an entire cathedral out of it. One kind sentence could make me forget a week of hurt. One good night could make me forgive a month of bad ones. One moment where he looked at me like I mattered could convince me that everything else had been worth enduring. I didn't understand that crumbs feel like a feast when you've been hungry for a long time. I didn't understand that until much later. Much later, when I started looking backward. Because one night, after another argument, another silence, another version of the same goodbye, I was lying in bed staring at the ceiling. The room was dark. My phone was beside me. I wasn't crying anymore. I was simply tired. And I asked myself something I had never asked before. Why? Not why did he hurt me. Not why did he leave. Not why couldn't he love me. I asked: Why do I keep going back? The question sat there. Heavy. Uncomfortable. Almost alive. And suddenly, something old stirred inside me. A memory I couldn't quite reach. A room. A child. A door. I didn't know why I thought of childhood. I didn't know why my mind went there. But suddenly I remembered something I had heard many years ago. That before I was old enough to understand love, before I knew what heartbreak was, before I knew the difference between a boyfriend and a husband, before I ever stood outside a man's door I had already learnt what it felt like to wait for someone to come back. I had already learnt what it felt like to belong somewhere temporarily. I had already learnt that being someone's child did not guarantee being someone's priority. And I realized something that frightened me. Maybe I hadn't fallen in love with him because he was the love of my life. Maybe part of me had recognized him because he felt familiar. The waiting. The uncertainty. The crumbs. The leaving. The returning. The constant question: Will you choose me this time? I knew that question. I had been asking it since I was a little girl. And suddenly the man I thought was the beginning of my heartbreak started looking like something else. An echo. A familiar song playing from another room. Different person. Same feeling. Same ache. Same girl. That night, I began digging. Not into him. Into me. And what I found wasn't pretty. There was a little girl in there. A girl who had learnt that love could be inconsistent. A girl who had learnt not to ask for too much. A girl who had learnt to be useful. Quiet. Good. A girl who learnt to swallow disappointment before it became someone else's inconvenience. A girl who learnt that people could say they loved you and still leave you somewhere else. A girl who learnt that promises could be made casually and broken without consequence. A girl who would later become a woman who heard I love you and still wondered, For how long? That was the beginning. Not the beginning of my relationship. The beginning of understanding it. Because before there was him, there was a house. Before there was his door, there were other doors. Before I learnt to knock softly on his, I had already learnt why. I was three months old when my mother took me from Pretoria back to the Free State. I don't remember being carried. I don't remember the road. I don't remember the house. I don't remember the first time someone put me down somewhere that wasn't home. But sometimes I wonder if the body remembers what the mind forgets. Because I have always been afraid of being left. And perhaps fear doesn't need a memory. Perhaps it only needs a beginning. Mine began before I could speak. Before I could walk. Before I could understand the word mother. Before I could understand that some children grow up in one house and call it home. I had already begun learning that home could be temporary. And maybe that is why, years later, when a man opened a door for me, I mistook being allowed inside for being chosen. I didn't know the difference yet. I would learn. But first, I had to go back. All the way back. To Pretoria. To the Free State. To the woman who gave birth to me. To the aunt who agreed to take me. To the sister who was still a child herself. To the winter. To the fire. To the little girl who had no idea that she was already learning the language she would speak in every relationship that came after. The language of waiting ;proving;of please don't leave me. I just didn't know how to say it yet.