“Dad really closes doors loudly.”
My daughter said
after reading one of my posts.
I smiled.
“Oh, I thought it was just me.”
For a long time,
I had wondered
if I was the only one
who felt that way.
Neither my daughter
nor my son
had ever said anything about it
before.
Bang.
Whenever a door closed that hard,
my body tightened
before I had a single thought.
I didn’t realize that
until recently.
I never noticed what came first.
I was just annoyed right away.
I Always Had an Explanation
At night,
I would be lying in bed,
almost asleep.
Bang.
Immediately,
my mind would begin talking.
I can’t sleep.
Why does he have to close the door so hard?
Sometimes I would lie there for a while,
then get up,
open my husband’s door,
and quietly say,
“Could you close it a little more gently?
I’m trying to sleep.”
Even when a neighbor slammed a door,
my reaction was the same.
It’s so late.
Why are they making that much noise?
Years ago,
when we lived in an officetel,
I often woke up
to heavy thuds from above.
There they go again.
It’s two in the morning.
Did they just get home?
A loud sound always pulled my attention.
My nervous system reacted automatically.
Whenever I mentioned it,
my husband would smile and say,
“You’re so sensitive.”
I would laugh too.
“You’re the one who can’t hear it.
You don’t even realize
how loud your own door is.”
Then I would start explaining
why it affected me so much.
His parents had become hard of hearing
as they got older.
The television was always loud.
People had to raise their voices.
Maybe he simply didn’t notice.
My parents were different.
Even when they were old,
our home stayed quiet.
Maybe that was why loud noises had always felt
unfamiliar to me.
Then
I remembered the years of living
with upstairs noise,
and all of it seemed to fit together.
I thought I finally understood the reason.
Something I Had Missed
One day,
I noticed something
I had never seen before.
My body had already reacted
before I explained the sound.
The sound came.
My body tightened.
Then came the annoyance.
Then came the explanations.
Nothing dangerous had happened.
No emergency.
No one was calling from the building office.
It was simply a loud sound.
Yet
my body spent energy
every single time.
Mid-point
Sometimes the explanation isn’t the beginning.
Sometimes it comes
after the body has already reacted.
A Different Response
So I tried something
different.
Bang.
There it is.
Bang.
Okay.
That was all.
No explanation.
No argument.
No story.
Just noticing.
Little by little,
something changed.
Late at night,
my husband would still open the front door,
go outside for a cigarette,
and close it again.
Somewhere in the distance,
I heard the sound.
Then I drifted back to sleep.
A Quiet Morning
Last night,
I heard my son’s slippers in the living room.
The refrigerator door opened.
Dishes clinked softly in the kitchen.
He must be getting something to eat.
That was all.
I stayed asleep.
The next morning,
I woke feeling rested.
A cool breeze came
through the open veranda window.
I stood there for a moment,
then sat by the window
at a café near my home,
sipping a hot Americano
as I opened my laptop.
Nothing outside had changed.
But
something inside me
had become much quieter.
