The Architecture of My Walls

The Architecture of My Walls

I never meant to build walls.

I meant to build safety.

It started as a boundary, then a fence, then a fortress—constructed out of every promise that broke, every hand that stung when it should have soothed, every version of love that came with terms and conditions I didn’t agree to but signed anyway. You don’t wake up one day inside a fortress; you wake up and realize you have spent years mortaring bricks while calling it “healing.”

People talk about walls like they only keep danger out.

They don’t mention that they also keep oxygen out. Or warmth. Or anything unfamiliar enough to feel risky but gentle enough to matter.

My walls were made of love—not the fairytale version, but the survival kind. The kind that teaches you to hold yourself together when no one else will. The kind you learn after being touched the wrong way by the wrong person at the wrong age. The kind you form when you’ve been told, directly or indirectly, that you’re safest when you rely on no one.

Love, for me, became a construction material.

And I used it to build distance.

Inside was quiet. Predictable. Mine.

But it was also lonely.

You can only stare at the same four emotional walls for so many years before they stop looking protective and start looking like a cell. And I didn’t realize how small my world had become until someone showed up and reached for the stones.

He didn’t come with a battering ram.

He didn’t demand entry.

He didn’t call my walls dramatic or unnecessary.

He simply stood at the base of them, patient in a way that made me uneasy, curious in a way that made me sharper, and kind in a way that made me suspicious. I had grown used to people who climbed through windows or picked locks—never someone who asked if he could climb at all.

And that’s what unsettled me the most.

Permission.

He scaled my walls like someone who wasn’t trying to conquer anything—just trying to see me from where I had hidden. Each foothold he found was one I’d left unintentionally: a moment of sarcasm, a glance held one second too long, the tremble in my voice when I lied and said I didn’t need anyone.

The truth is, I never wanted the walls to be impenetrable.

Just strong enough to keep the wrong people out.

I just didn’t expect someone right to show up.

When he finally reached the top, he didn’t pull me out.

He didn’t drag me into anything.

He just sat beside me on the cold ledge, legs swinging over the edge like we were two kids on a rooftop looking out at a world I’d been too afraid to reenter.

I’m still not sure whether the walls are coming down or whether he’s teaching me how to build doors where there used to be brick. Maybe both. Maybe healing is less about demolition and more about renovation.

I don’t know how this ends.

But I know this:

For the first time in years, I’m not guarding the walls.

I’m leaning over them, watching someone climb, feeling something I thought I had boarded up.

Hope.

Or maybe something scarier—

possibility.

Either way, the map of my heart is being redrawn.

Not because he’s forcing it,

but because I’m finally brave enough to imagine a world outside the walls I built to survive.