The secret door

Any person will always, eventually, in their life, get to a point in which they shall have amassed a particularly checkered past. We all start out new and fresh and sinless, but as we go along, we make mistakes. Sometimes we even consciously and deliberately do wrong things, evil things, for reasons that may or may not be justifiable. We take the wrong jobs. We don't work hard enough in the right jobs. We settle down in the wrong city. We take for granted the right city. We strike up relationships with the wrong people. We mess up our relationships with the right people. We hurt the people we love. We prioritize the people who don't care about us. We generally make a mess of our lives when we should have been taking care of it. We all get there. No one in this day and age can turn forty still pristine. We are bound to get scratched and broken along the way, and many times it will be of our own doing. 

But we seem to have a relatively comfortable acceptance of this fact. Though we might regret many things in our past, we still find the strength to move on, grasping at whatever we can hold so as not to crucify ourselves for the wrong decisions and not drown in the uncertainties of the future. We tell ourselves, "That's okay. I have learned from this experience and I am the better for it." We tell ourselves, "If this is the consequence I have to bear for the wrongs that I have done, I'll deal with it." We tell ourselves, "This will all make sense someday." And we keep all these inside of us, inside hearts that, as we grow older, gradually expand to accommodate these efforts to reason our doubts and fears and guilt away. 

When we find someone that we are willing to take a chance with, we open the door to our heart and let him in. And when he walks in, he beholds  everything that we have been bottling up, not just our doubts and fears and guilt but also the things we have placed alongside them to counter their powers. We show him our imperfections, and hope he still continues to love us. We show him and give him all that we are, and hope that he accepts the whole package. That's the ideal. That's the plan. But we don't always end up doing things that way, because new love is always terrified of judgement.

We are afraid that if he finds out about our past, he will think us unworthy of his love. We are afraid that he will be ashamed of us, and deem us unfit to be his partner in life. We are terrified to be seen as less than beautiful. And so we hide our past from him. 

We then reconfigure our hearts to have two doors. The first door is the one we lead him to. This door contains carefully curated things about us, good things and happy things, things that will make us look good in his eyes, our plans for the future, our right decisions, our accomplishments. This door makes us look strong and desirable and worthy of love. The second door, on the other hand, is hidden and always kept locked. Behind this secret door we keep the darkest moments of our past, the evils we have done, the particularly regrettable choices, the bad alliances. We keep this second door always in the shadows, carefully kept behind other things, so that he won't see it. And then we live our days in constant anxiety over that secret door to our past.

Sometimes I wonder how it would feel to have a man to whom I can open that hidden door, and have him walk in and walk through all the muck and mire that's there, and come out of it still completely in love with me. I wonder how it would feel to have that door wide open, all things that used to be inside it surrendered to the light of day, all walls that surround it taken down by his love and acceptance. I wonder how it would feel to have him tell me, "You are more beautiful in my eyes now after I have seen what you have gone through."

And inside this ever-widening space that is my heart, after the two doors have opened, I wonder how it would feel to have all partitions inside my heart fall down piece by piece by iron piece. I wonder how it would feel to finally have no more doors, no more walls. I wonder how it would feel to have a heart that is a bright, large, open field that he can run around in, arms wide open.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3]