..
I know a room where there was nothing but darkness. No window to let the morning in. No ventilation to carry away the stale air. No crack in the walls through which a little light might find its way. There was only darkness – thick, suffocating, and endless.
There was a door, though. But the strange thing about that door was that it could only be opened from the inside. Nobody outside could force their way in. No matter how much they knocked, pleaded, waited, or called your name, they remained on the other side. They could tell you they were there. They could promise they wouldn’t leave. They could even sit outside the door for as long as you needed. But most of them would gradually leave.
Those who remained, they couldn’t open the door for you because only you could.
Whether you allowed anyone into that room depended, more than anything, on how far you had travelled from your grief. How much of your chaos you had managed to make sense of. How much of yourself you had found again beneath everything that had broken. Because grief has a way of turning a room into a world. I have known that room which turned into a world in itself.
At first, you don’t even notice the darkness. You become so accustomed to it that you begin to believe darkness is all there is. You forget that there is a world outside, that there are people who might sit beside you without asking you to be okay. And even if, in the worst case, there is no one waiting outside that door for you, there is a whole life waiting on the other side. There are wounds that make us build rooms like this. Rooms where nobody can reach us, where we can fall apart without witnesses, where our anger, fear, guilt, and sorrow can exist without having to be made understandable to anyone else.
But I have also known a world that existed right outside that door. I have known a kind of hope that did not need to be rebuilt from nothing, it only needed to be watered, nurtured, and given enough time to grow. I have known a tiny ray of light waiting patiently at the threshold, ready to find its way into the dark room through even the smallest opening.
And perhaps that is the strange thing about that door, it never opens because you are completely ready. You open it when, despite everything, you finally find enough strength to take the first step towards it. I recently read about the concept of activation energy in chemistry/physics. Activation energy is the minimum amount of energy required to get a chemical reaction started. It is like giving a reaction the initial push it needs to overcome a barrier. Once that barrier is crossed, the reaction can proceed much more easily.
You may only open it an inch. You may close it again. And from opening that door to finally learning to love the world outside it, that journey can take a leap of faith, years of becoming, countless heartbreaks, gloomy days, disappointments, and betrayals. But sometimes, all it takes to begin is the smallest opening. Just enough for the light to remind you that there is still a world outside the darkness, and perhaps, somewhere within you, there is still a part of you that wants to see it.
While I am equally grateful to have known both — the room and the world that exists beyond it, I know there will still be days when you will want to crawl back into that room. Days when the world outside feels too loud, too demanding, too painful, and all you will want is the familiar darkness. But by then, you will know better.
You will understand that retreating for a while is not the same as giving up, and that you can rest without returning to the darkness permanently. Because once you have known the warmth of the sun, the openness of the sky, the softness of flowers, and the simple beauty of being alive, they become reminders of what exists beyond your pain.
