My husband was eating yogurt at the table.
I was slicing an apple for him.
“Last night,
you closed the door so hard.
It woke me up.
Then I heard
you struggling in the bathroom.”
He smiled.
“You never used to notice.
Why have you become
so sensitive lately?”
I laughed
as I walked toward the balcony.
“Maybe my ears finally opened.”
Our morning
went on as usual.
Light.
Easy.
A Different Morning
A few months ago,
the same conversation
would have gone very differently.
It was almost like
an automatic recording.
I would say,
“You closed the door so hard
that it woke me up.”
He would answer,
“You’ve become more sensitive.”
And before either of us realized it,
our own stories
were already unfolding.
Mine sounded something like this.
There he goes again.
Does he even realize
he always says the same thing?
Why can’t he simply say,
“I’m sorry”?
I lost sleep because of the noise,
and somehow
this has become about me.
Even his tone annoys me.
Maybe we shouldn’t talk
in the morning at all.
A small conversation
would quietly grow
into hurt feelings.
Old disappointments
would return.
Sometimes,
my mind would even wonder
why I had married him
in the first place.
Mid-point
The conversation had ended.
But my story had only begun.
Then I Saw His Story
Then
I noticed something
I had never seen before.
I wasn’t the only one
creating a story.
He probably had one, too.
Maybe it sounded
something like this.
There she goes again.
Does she realize
she always brings this up?
It was just a door.
Why is she blaming me
for waking her up?
She really has become
more sensitive.
We both thought
we were responding
to each other.
But we weren’t.
We were responding
to the stories
our own minds
had already written.
What We Actually Knew
The strange thing was,
neither of us
knew those stories
were stories.
We each believed
they were simply
what had happened.
But when I looked closely,
there was very little
we actually knew.
I knew
I had woken up.
He knew
he had closed the door.
Everything else
had quietly been filled in
by our own minds.
Looking back,
I realized
we weren’t arguing
about a door.
We were reacting
to stories
that felt
like facts.
Once a story
feels
like a fact,
our feelings
begin
to grow around it.
