I drove home with the radio off because one more voice felt impossible

Dear Delyara, Not because I wanted silence in some spiritual, poetic way. Because sound had become unbearable. Work voices. Phone voices. School voices. The voice inside me that keeps listing everything that still needs doing. By the time I got in the car, even the idea of music felt like one more thing entering a body that had already been entered too much. So I drove in silence. And the silence did not feel peaceful at first. It felt bare. Then necessary. Then strangely kind. I think that’s one of the things nobody says clearly enough about exhaustion: it isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it is just a woman who cannot survive one more layer of input on a Tuesday at 5:40 p.m.