I found a permission slip inside a cookbook and felt like my whole life had merged into one room

Dear Delyara, I was looking for a recipe and found a school paper instead, folded between two pages about rice dishes and soup. It should have been funny. It almost was. But what I really felt was tired. Work inside home. School inside dinner. Tomorrow inside tonight. I don’t feel like I live in separate parts anymore. Everything leaks into everything else, and I am the one who keeps discovering the leaks first. I put the slip on the table and stood there longer than I needed to. Sometimes the hardest thing about adulthood is not the size of the tasks. It is the feeling that no corner of life stays in its own corner for long.