The Weight of Unanswered Doors

The Debt of Regret

By: Abdul Muhammad


Silas was a collector of ghosts. Not the kind that rattled chains, but the kind that settled in the soul with the weight of lead and the chill of forgotten mornings. He was a Regret Eater, the best in the city. For a price, he would listen, absorb, and take. He would carry the burden so others wouldn't have to.

His apartment was a tomb built of their sorrows. Though it looked sparse and clean to any visitor, the air was thick with the phantom pressure of his accumulated cargo. The corner by the window held the crushing guilt of a businessman who had betrayed his partner. The space behind the sofa was heavy with a mother’s grief over a harsh word she could never take back. They were all invisible, but to Silas, they were as real as the floor beneath his feet, a constant, suffocating gravity that bowed his shoulders and etched lines into his face.

The knock, when it came, was all wrong. It wasn't the timid, shame-filled tap of a client. It was firm, resonant, and carried a finality that made his bones ache. He opened the door to find a woman, her eyes not pleading, but clear and deep with a sorrow so old it had become a part of her.

“I’m not here to hire you, Mr. Silas,” she said, her voice steady. “I’m here to confess. There is one regret I could never give away. It belongs to me.”

Intrigued, and weary of the transactional nature of his work, he let her in. She sat on his single wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap, and began.

“My name is Clara,” she said. “Twenty years ago, I was living in a small apartment on Elm Street. It was a stormy night, thunder shaking the windows. There was a knock at my door. Frantic, desperate. I was young, alone, and frightened. I… I didn’t answer. I just stood there, frozen, listening as the pounding faded away into the rain.”

She paused, the memory a physical presence in the room. Silas felt a familiar coldness begin to seep into his bones, but this one felt different. Sharper.

“The next morning,” Clara continued, her voice dropping to a whisper, “I read about it in the paper. A young man, caught in the storm, had been disoriented and lost. He’d been looking for help, trying to find a phone. He had knocked on a door, but no one answered. He stumbled back into the flood and was swept away.”

The cold in Silas’s marrow intensified, crystallizing into a dread he hadn’t felt in decades. Elm Street. A stormy night. A story he knew not from the news, but from the deepest, most locked-away chamber of his own heart.

“His name was Leo,” Clara finished, a single tear tracing a path down her cheek. “My regret isn’t just that I didn’t open the door. It’s that I never knew if I could have saved him. I have carried the weight of that unanswered door every day since.”

The air left Silas’s lungs. The name was a key, turning a lock he had sealed shut a lifetime ago. The sparse apartment seemed to press in on him, the collective weight of a thousand regrets suddenly insignificant next to the anvil now sitting on his chest.

“You’re wrong,” he rasped, his own voice sounding foreign and broken. “You couldn’t have saved him.”

Clara looked up, startled by the raw pain in his tone.

Silas’s professional detachment shattered. “I know,” he whispered, “because I was there.”

The room swam. The carefully constructed dam holding back his own past burst.

“It was my brother, Leo,” Silas said, the confession tearing itself from him. “He was coming to see me. We’d had a fight, a terrible one over money. I told him I never wanted to see him again.” He looked at Clara, his eyes mirroring her bottomless grief. “He was knocking on your door, but he was running from me. From the things I said. My regret… the one I could never bear to confess, even to myself… was that my anger turned him away. I am the reason he was in that storm.”

For a moment, there was only silence, thicker and heavier than any Silas had ever collected. Two separate regrets, carried for two decades, now swirled together in the center of the room, intertwined and inseparable.

Clara’s regret was the unanswered door. Silas’s was the one he had slammed shut.

He had spent his life taking on the weight of strangers, building a fortress of their sorrows to hide from his own. Now, faced with the one burden he was truly meant to carry, he felt his knees buckle. The gravitational pull of their shared tragedy was crushing, a debt of regret that could never be paid, only shared.

Clara didn’t offer forgiveness. He didn’t ask for it. Instead, she reached out and placed her hand over his. It was not a transfer, not a transaction. It was an anchor. Two souls, shipwrecked by the same storm, finally finding each other in the deep, dark water of what might have been. The weight did not disappear, but for the first time, it was no longer his to carry alone.