What did I do?

Tell me plainly

what did I do, what small mistake lives in the space

between your shut door and my steady knocking?

What echo of me has bruised the hush that now sits heavy on your side?

I stand at the threshold with my hands empty, asking the same plain thing: what did I do?

You fold your silence like paper, tidy and exact, and place it across our table.

I trace the crease with a fingertip as if a map might form: where did the route turn?

Was it the words I didn’t say, or the words I said too loudly and clumsily?

Was it a memory I stepped on like a dried leaf, unaware it was still tethered to you?

Why are you treating me this way

as if my name had become a nuisance,

as if my breath could be paused and resumed when convenient?

Why do you arrange your days to fall between us like a wall of light I cannot step through?

You turn the calendar into armor and let the dates do the blunt work of forgetting.

I count the small offenses that might have stacked into this,

and every one looks ridiculous and impossible at once: a late reply, a tone misunderstood,

a dinner left unsaid, a careless joke that landed on a place I could not see.

But none of them feel big enough to build a silence that wide, and yet here it is.

When you walk past me in the same room and do not meet my eyes,

is it punishment mapped in precise, diminishing strokes?

Do you imagine I am less because I asked for something tender and clumsy,

or because I held on to a hope that you no longer had the space to catch?

Tell me where the gate lowers

is it something I said in winter, or something I failed to do come spring?

Point to the hour when your warmth thinned and I could have turned it with a different hand.

If the wound is mine, lay out the stitches so I can learn the pattern and unweave it.

If the wound is yours, tell me its name so I can hold it without flinching.

Why am I being shut out

by voice, by glance, by the careful rearrangement of our everyday?

Do you think absence will teach me to leave, that distance will tidy what is messy between us?

Do you imagine cold will purge the ache, that ignoring will make both of us cleaner?

I am not asking for explanations dressed up in reason; I am asking to be let back into the room.

I have rehearsed apologies that feel clumsy in the mouth but honest in the heart:

I’m sorry for the times I shrank your light with my own shadows.

I’m sorry for impatience that wore the edges of us ragged.

I’m sorry for speaking when listening would have been the better kind of brave.

And yet, apologies are poor currency when the market is closed.

You have put your hand on the ledger and refused to mark the exchange.

If forgiveness is a doorway, slide it open a fraction so I may pass;

if not forgiveness, then at least a sentence

say the cost so I can pay it.

Is this silence a fortress, or a house of cards trembling and waiting?

I imagine you there, cataloguing reasons, aligning them like stones to make a wall.

But I have seen walls fall for reasons small and ridiculous and tender: a laugh, a touch, a sudden admission of a softer truth.

Let the wall be fragile; let someone be clumsy and honest and change the weather.

Do you fear that reopening will scar you with the same old grooves?

Do you fear that I will return and bring the storm back on my shoulders?

I would carry my storm in my hands if that is what it takes

but I will set it down at the threshold.

If you want, I will learn a new weather for you, one measured in steady rain and gentle light.

I have nights where I name the precise sound of your silence, where every tick of the clock is an accusation.

I have mornings where I invent small, plausible reasons: tiredness, busy hands, a phone that dies at the worst minute.

I swing between the rational and the raw like a pendulum that knows no center.

Take me off the clock and speak to me in human time.

Do you want space, or do you want the story rewritten entirely?

If space, tell me how much

a day, a week, an honest tally

and I will hold to that measurement.

If rewrite, tell me where the plot should bend; I will hold the pen and learn your hand.

If fracture, tell me whether it is final; I will not cling like an argument that will not end.

I ask not to accuse, but to know what I did so I can stop doing it, or to know that nothing was done at all.

Teach me the shape of the mistake, or the shape of the grief that holds you silent.

Do not make me guess by the way you move away; do not let me learn your language through absence.

Open the door at least a sliver so I can see the light you keep for yourself.

If there is a shadow there, tell me its name and I will call it by name with you.

If there is a reason you must be cold, let me be the place where you warm your hands for a minute.

I carry no weapons but a hope that is weary and relentless.

I will wait without dramatics; I will wait without threats.

I will practice the patience that love sometimes requires and the boldness that truth sometimes demands.

When you are ready to say the thing that has been folding you inward, say it plainly.

When you are ready to let me back into the simple geography of your day, step aside and I will walk through.

If all this pleading were a key, it would be rough-hewn and imperfect, but it would turn.

If this plea were music, it would be a long note held until your ear remembers the interval.

I ask again, because asking is how we find the seam: what did I do, why are you treating me this way, why am I being shut out

and I will keep asking until the silence answers with a door opening.

I do not want to return to what was if what was was only a better rehearsal for leaving;

I want to come back to a place that knows us both fully and can keep us both gently.

Speak plainly, and the long unbraided hours will find their thread and be mended into something we can wear together.