The Doors We Leave Open
There is something symbolic about doors that I don't think we appreciate enough. We walk through hundreds of them every week without giving them a second thought, yet some of them quietly divide our lives into a clear before and after. We leave a city, finish a project, let go of a dream or accept that someone is no longer part of our path. Looking back, I don't think life changes through dramatic moments as often as we imagine. More often, it changes through ordinary decisions whose importance only becomes visible much later. One door closes, another opens, and years later we realise that we never truly returned to the person we were before crossing that threshold.
For a long time, I believed growth was mostly about opening new doors. I was always looking ahead, searching for the next opportunity, the next lesson or the next chapter. It sounded optimistic, even inspiring, until I realised that opening doors had never been my greatest challenge. Closing them had. Starting again is exciting because it gives us hope. Ending something is less glamorous because it asks us to accept that not everything is meant to last. And even harder than that is closing the door on a story that never had the chance to become what we believed it could be. Because then we are not only saying goodbye to what was. We are also saying goodbye to what might have been. And sometimes that second loss is even greater.
I Have Loved Two People in My Life
I have loved two people in my life. Paradoxically, I was never actually with either of them.
With one, the distance existed mostly on the level of life itself. It wasn't a lack of connection. Quite the opposite. There was something between us that was impossible to ignore: intellectual resonance, emotional understanding, chemistry, the feeling that we were somehow tuned to the same frequency. And yet in practice, we missed each other on almost every level. Values, timing, choices, readiness, direction in life — all of it formed two parallel tracks that could run very close to one another without ever truly meeting.
For a long time, that was difficult for me to understand, because when a connection feels strong, it is easy to believe that a shared path should naturally follow. If something feels that deep, that obvious, that difficult to dismiss, surely it must be leading somewhere. But connection and relationship are not the same thing.
A connection can be immediate. It can exist without plans, without definitions, without a shared life. It can be emotional, intellectual, psychological, sexual. It can transform us from the inside. A relationship, however, needs the real world. It needs time, decisions, presence, repetition, compromise and a shared rhythm. It needs two people who not only feel something, but who also want to do something with that feeling at roughly the same time.
That story taught me how powerful a connection can be without ever translating into real life. It taught me that you can feel something profoundly real with another person and still have no shared everyday life with them. You can feel close to someone internally and still miss each other in reality. And I think that difference between connection and relationship became one of the most important things I had to understand.
With the second person, the distance was mainly geographical. That story looked different. We didn't so much miss each other on the level of life as live, for a long time, in the space between reality and potential. Distance gives imagination a great deal of room. When someone is far away, many things can remain undefined. Feelings can be intense, tension can be powerful, the connection can feel almost tangible, while reality itself remains completely still.
Over time, I began to see that geographical distance can create a very particular kind of illusion. Not because the feelings are unreal, but because everyday life never gets the chance to test them. You don't see how someone behaves on an ordinary Tuesday. You don't know how they handle conflict, boredom, decisions or what their presence looks like when there is no romantic tension holding everything together. Imagination fills the gaps much faster than reality ever could.
That story taught me that intensity does not always mean quality. Tension can feel powerful precisely because something remains unresolved. Potential can be incredibly convincing until it has to be translated into actual decisions, actions and presence in another person's life. At some point, you have to stop asking what someone feels, what they think, what they want or what could happen. You have to start looking at what actually exists.
Connection Does Not Always Mean a Shared Path
These two stories were completely different, yet they brought me to a similar conclusion. The fact that we feel an enormous connection with someone does not automatically mean that something real binds us together in life.
For a long time, I thought that if someone moved me that deeply, if their presence stirred so much in me, if I could speak to them in a way I couldn't speak to anyone else, then surely it had to mean something about the future too. Now I know that it doesn't have to. Meaning and destiny are not the same thing. Something can matter enormously and still not be meant to last.
I think this is one of the hardest paradoxes of adulthood: learning to respect the significance of something without automatically turning that significance into a promise of a future.
Sometimes someone enters our life not to stay, but to show us something about ourselves. Sometimes we need someone else's eyes in order to see ourselves more clearly. A person can awaken our femininity, courage, sexuality, ambition, sensitivity or a part of ourselves we had never fully allowed to exist. They can show us how deeply we are capable of loving. They can also show us how long we are willing to hold on to what is unavailable.
One person taught me how strong resonance can be, and how little it means without mutual rhythm in everyday life. The other taught me how easy it is to confuse intensity with reality and potential with something that is actually manifesting. Both were incredibly important to me. Not because they stayed, but because they changed me.
People as Mirrors
Some people enter our lives like mirrors. They don't only show us who they are. They show us who we are.
With one person, we may discover how deeply we are capable of connecting, how much we value intellect, chemistry, shared language and the feeling of being understood. At the same time, we may also see how easily fascination with what is unavailable or unresolved begins to consume our energy. With another, we may see our desire to be chosen, our need for potential to finally become movement, and how much time we are willing to spend analysing someone else's intentions instead of asking a simpler question: is this person actually present in my life?
That is why some people can change us more than relationships that lasted far longer. Not because they were objectively more important, but because they touched a part of us that was ready to transform.
Sometimes another person brings something to the surface that had been living inside us for years without a name. They reveal our desires, wounds, boundaries, patterns and needs. What we love in them may show us what we want for ourselves. What hurts us may reveal what we no longer want to repeat. What we keep waiting for may expose the places where we are still giving someone else power over our own sense of worth.
Sometimes the greatest transformation is not getting an answer to the question, "Why isn't he doing anything?" It is the moment we stop needing that answer. We begin to understand that another person's behaviour does not define our worth, and that their choice is not proof of whether we are enough. We can take our energy back from the space of waiting and return it to ourselves.
And I think that is one of the most important functions of certain encounters. They are not always meant to lead us to the other person. Sometimes they are meant to lead us back to our own centre.
Not Every Important Person Is Meant to Stay
For a long time, I thought that if someone had a profound impact on my life, they must have appeared in it in order to stay. Now I see those as two entirely different things. Someone can be one of the most important people in our life and still not be the person we are meant to build a future with.
They can wake us up, force us to see the truth about ourselves, make us stop tolerating what we once tolerated, or trigger a kind of growth that no calm and predictable period of life ever could. They can teach us how to love, even if they never teach us how to be together.
This is probably where it becomes easiest to confuse a role with destiny. If someone played such a significant role, we assume they should also have a permanent place. But not every role is meant to last a lifetime.
Sometimes someone is a catalyst, not a destination.
Sometimes their purpose is not to stay beside us, but to start a process that cannot be undone. After meeting them, we begin choosing differently, setting different boundaries, understanding ourselves differently. And then, even if the person is no longer there, their influence remains. Not as longing, but as part of the structure of who we have become.
The Future That Never Existed
I think this is also why some doors are so difficult to close. We are not holding on only to a person. We are holding on to the future we built around them.
The human imagination can create an extraordinary amount from very little. A few meaningful conversations, intense chemistry, a shared language, one "maybe someday" and suddenly there is an entire life. Trips. A home. Ordinary days. A version of ourselves we might have become beside that person. And even if none of it ever happened, emotionally we can live inside that future as if it already partly belonged to us.
That may be why some stories that were never officially "relationships" can hurt more than relationships that lasted for years. A real relationship at least has boundaries. It has everyday life, conflict, facts. A story built on potential can remain infinite because reality never fully tested it. It can be idealised forever.
That is why the loss can be completely real even if the relationship never was. The feeling was real. The connection was real. The transformation was real. But the future may have existed only in projection.
And I think it is important to learn how to say that without invalidating our own emotions. We don't need to tell ourselves, "Nothing happened, so I have no right to grieve." Something did happen. You changed. You felt. You saw yourself differently. But that still does not mean the future you imagined was a promise.
Closing a Door Does Not Mean Forgetting
For a long time, I thought closing a door meant reaching a point where we stopped remembering. Now I think it means something completely different. We can remember everything and still stop negotiating with the past.
The problem is not memory. The problem is continuously leaving room for an alternative ending. What if? Maybe someday? Maybe if we had met at another time? Maybe if the distance had been smaller? Maybe if our lives had looked different?
Those questions can keep a door open for years. Not because we truly want to return to what was, but because we are still trying to save what never happened. And that is a very different thing.
At some point, we have to accept that a story may have been important exactly as it was. Without rewriting the ending. Without waiting for someone to eventually become the person they have existed as only in our imagination. Without convincing ourselves that because the connection survived, the relationship should too.
Closing a door does not mean something stopped mattering. Sometimes it means the opposite: it mattered enough that we no longer want to reduce it to an endless "maybe someday."
We can be grateful to someone for everything they awakened in us and still decide not to build our future around them. That does not take meaning away from the story. It simply gives meaning back to the present.
Meaning Is Not Measured in Time
Maybe one of the greatest mistakes we make is believing that the value of something can be measured by how long it lasted. These two stories taught me that time and meaning have surprisingly little to do with each other.
Neither was a conventional relationship. Neither lasted in the real world for as long as you might expect from something that had such a profound impact. And yet both stayed with me for years: in my choices, in the boundaries I can set today, in the way I understand reciprocity, in the fact that I no longer confuse connection with relationship, and in how little interest I now have in potential without action. I no longer ask only, "What does someone feel?" I ask, "What do they do with it?"
Some people stay in our lives for decades and change almost nothing in us. Others pass through briefly and divide our lives into who we were before them and who we became afterwards. Sometimes one conversation stays with us longer than years of everyday life. Sometimes one kiss stays deeper than an entire relationship. Sometimes someone we were never truly with affects our life more profoundly than someone who stood beside us for years.
Meaning is not measured in time. It is measured in transformation.
The Life Beyond the Door
And I think this is where I arrive at where I am today. Very recently — only this week, really — I realised that there are doors I should close once and for all. Not because what was behind them did not matter. Not because I no longer consider those people important. And not because I want to erase what I learned through them. Quite the opposite. I want to close those doors precisely because I finally understand why they were open.
I don't want so much "what if" in my life anymore. I want more of: "What will I actually build now?" I don't want to keep looking back at potential simply because it once felt intense. I don't want to spend my energy analysing whether someone will make a move, when they will make it, or whether one day the circumstances will finally become perfect. I don't want to keep space open for a future that has spent years refusing to become the present.
I want to take that energy back and put it into myself. Into the work I want to create. Into my own home. Into the life I want to build. Into people who will not exist only as possibilities, but who will actually be present. Into a love where I will not have to constantly distinguish between what someone feels and what they do, because one will naturally lead to the other.
I want less potential and more reality. Less analysing intensity and more building. Less looking back at closed doors and more curiosity about the ones I cannot even see yet.
And maybe that is what beginning a new era really means. Not pretending the past did not matter, but recognising that it mattered exactly as much as it needed to. It changed me. It showed me myself. It taught me the difference between connection and reciprocity, between potential and reality. And that is enough.
If something is meant to have a place in our life, I believe that eventually it will have a place in the real world too. Not only in feelings, not only in imagination, and not only in what might happen, but in presence, decisions and action.
And if that place is not there, maybe our task is not to keep the door open. Maybe our task is to be grateful for who we became on the other side of it, close it behind us and finally move forward.
Some experiences are not meant to stay with us for years. They are meant to stay with us for the rest of who we become.
..
Both of them taught me how to love, but in completely different ways. The first became an inspiration. That connection made me want to become the best version of myself and to never again feel as though I was not enough. The second showed me how deeply I am capable of loving, but also how much more important the real world is than fantasy. We can spend years inside an imagined future, and even if the lesson we take from it is meaningful, it is still worth learning how to tell one from the other.
I still don't know whether what ended us was the physical distance, or the distance we created ourselves through unspoken expectations. Both of them met me at my lowest, at two different moments in my life when I was struggling in very different ways. Neither of them chose me, but both of them taught me how to choose. I chose myself.
Both of them taught me how to love. I learned to love myself.
Maybe that is what some people are meant to leave us with: not a shared future, but a clearer understanding of who we are. Not every love becomes a life together, and that does not make it meaningless. Some people change the direction of our lives simply by showing us what we are capable of feeling, what we are no longer willing to accept, and what we are finally ready to choose for ourselves. And sometimes the most important ending is the one that returns us fully to our own life.
I'm learning to open up, to be willing to feel uncomfortable, and to do things differently at this stage of my life so that the life I build feels truly my own. I know that authenticity and vulnerability cannot exist without one another.
And today, I am grateful — for the lessons, for the love, and for the person I am becoming because of them.
Grateful for the love most of all, because whatever form it takes, love is still love — and I don't think there is anything more powerful in this life.
xx
L
