I was not born in a barn...

... therefore I close doors.

Literally and otherwise.

Lost One once told me in not so many words, that there were some women who he previously dated, to whom the door was always left ajar. At that time he was trying to close the door to me, hence the enormity of what he had said did not strike me.

It was not till many make ups and break ups with him later that this sentence came back to haunt me in the form of his first love. I have opinions on what the reasons were for their demise from what little he said. However, that in the context of this post is neither here nor there. What matters is that he had never closed the door to her.

And it stung.

How does one really take the fact that in some part of the man you thought loved you, is this tiny spark of hope that someday things might work out between him and someone else?

To me anyway, a large part of being in a relationship is tcerebral. I believe you can emotionally cheat on your partner without lifting a finger physically. I don't believe that the absence of the act makes this any less wrong or any easier to swallow.

So I close doors. At the dregs of a relationship, I will flog that horse till it is good and dead. I do this so that when I leave that relationship, I know there is nothing more I could have done. So I know I will never go back.

Some enter again through a different door, in a different context, in another lifetime. But it will never be that same door and never those circumstances.

Sure, it's natural to stare at that door for a while. To, in some way, wish it would open back up. And that's ok, so long as you don't look at the closed door so long that you miss one that's open.

Open doors let in too much, and seldom anything good. We owe it to the ones we will love in the future to close those doors in our past.

Photo courtesy of Engineer J on Flickr.