The Hallway

You are standing between two rooms.

One behind you still knows the shape of your footsteps.

The other has never had the right to call itself yours.

And I— I am somewhere at the far end of the hallway,

watching you with one hand still resting on a door you say you want to close.

That is the cruelty of it.

Not that you do not feel.

Not that I do not.

But that feeling has arrived before freedom.

And what are we supposed to do with that?

I call you my friend because language has laws,

and we are already breaking enough of them.

But friend has never been the shape of what I feel.

Friend is what I say when the truth would ask too much of you.

Because I do not want the polite distance of friendship.

I want the unremarkable things.

Your tired voice at the end of a difficult day.

The way your face looks when there is no reason to make it beautiful.

The silence that does not need filling.

Your anger.

Your laughter.

Your moods.

Your ordinary.

Not the pieces of you that can be borrowed between obligations.

I want the woman who does not have to look over her shoulder.

And maybe that is selfish.

Because right now you are trying to untangle yourself from a life that has had years to tie its knots.

I see it.

Every time you move forward and something pulls.

Every time you speak like a woman already leaving,

then become quiet like someone remembering how expensive leaving can be.

So I do not pull.

God knows I want to.

But I do not want to become another hand dragging you in a direction.

I want you to arrive because you walked.

Because you chose.

Because one morning you looked at the life around you and knew exactly which parts were yours

and which parts you had merely survived.

There is a strange pain in loving someone who is almost free.

Almost is such a violent word.

It can keep hope alive without giving it anywhere to live.

Almost leaving.

Almost choosing.

Almost here.

Almost us.

And perhaps that is why I sometimes call you friend.

Because I need a word that will not collapse under the weight of everything else.

But when I say it,

something in me always flinches.

Because you have never felt like friendship.

You feel like recognition.

Like hearing a song you somehow knew before anyone taught you the melody.

Like finding a sentence already written in your own handwriting

that you do not remember writing.

There is something between us I cannot explain away.

And I am tired of trying.

So no—

I do not want to be your friend.

Not in the way the word means.

I want to be the place you reach when you no longer have to reach secretly.

I want to hold you without wondering who the moment belongs to.

I want your hand without borrowing it.

Your time without stealing it.

Your heart without asking you to break another one just to place it in mine.

And until then,

I remain here.

Not waiting at a grave.

Not mourning what has already happened.

Just watching a woman stand in a hallway

between the life she is trying to leave

and the life she has not yet decided she is allowed to want.

And perhaps that is the hardest place for me to love you from—

because I can see you.

You can see me.

There is no ocean.

No disappearance.

No mystery.

Only a few unfinished steps

and a door

you must close with your own hand.