I found the permission slip under the cookbook

Dear Delyara, I had already checked the obvious places twice and was fully into that familiar maternal spiral where a missing sheet of paper starts feeling like evidence that I’m no longer running my own life properly. Then there it was, under a cookbook I had no memory of touching. Relief came first. Then irritation. Then that ugly self-doubt that arrives after every near miss: what else are you forgetting, what else is already slipping, how many things can one mind hold before the edges fray. I hate how quickly I turn small mistakes into existential ones. And yet, in a life made of so many little details, small things rarely stay small in me for long.