I put the leftovers away and felt strangely sad

Dear Delyara, I don’t know why that moment got me. Dinner was over. The plates were mostly done. The children had drifted off into their own evening shapes. I was standing in the kitchen spooning the remains of the meal into a plastic container, and suddenly I felt that quiet ache that sometimes arrives after the day has done enough damage that the body finally notices. Maybe it was the ordinariness of it. The sense that so much of my life is lived in these small repetitive after-moments — clearing, storing, resetting, making the next day easier while no one is really looking. Not because I am a martyr. Because that is the shape the love takes. I closed the lid and put it in the fridge and thought how often tenderness and tiredness live in exactly the same movement of my hands.