©ESR 2026

There is a door I can no longer open.

I know where it is. I can picture it clearly—the shape of it, the way the light used to fall across it, the feeling of standing just on the other side without thinking twice.

At the time, it wasn’t a door at all.

It was just… life.

Something I moved through without hesitation, without awareness that I would one day look back and realize it had closed behind me.

Time doesn’t announce itself when it does that.

There’s no sound of a latch. No turning of a handle. No moment where you’re told, this is the last time you will walk through here as you are now.

It simply happens.

Quietly.

And only later do you recognize what it was.

I can still see it, in a way.

Memory acts like a window—clear enough to recognize what once was, but never quite accurate. The colors shift. The edges soften. The feeling changes depending on where I’m standing now.

I can look through it.

But I can’t step back into it.

I can’t feel it as it was.

I can’t be the version of myself who once moved through that space without question.

There are moments I try, out of habit more than intention.

I revisit something familiar—a place, a thought, a memory—and for a brief second, it almost feels like I’m standing at that threshold again.

But it doesn’t hold.

Because it can’t.

The door didn’t just close.

I changed.

There’s a quiet kind of grief in that realization.

Not sharp. Not overwhelming.

Just a soft understanding that some things are meant to be lived once, and only once, exactly as they were.

Not to be recreated.

Not to be returned to.

Only remembered.

And maybe that’s the purpose of those doors.

Not to stay open.

But to shape the person who walks through them.

The door is still there.

I can see it.

I can remember it.

But I no longer belong on the other side of it.