I sat in the car before going inside

Dear Delyara, The house was right there. I just couldn’t enter it immediately. Not because I don’t love the people in it. Because I knew the second I opened that front door, I would become needed in seven directions at once. Dinner. Shoes. Questions. School. Noise. The evening. More language. More usefulness. So I sat still with the engine off and my bag in my lap and looked at nothing for a minute. That pause matters more to me than it should. It is the small border between one version of me and the next. Without it, I carry work straight into family and family gets the sharp leftovers of a day they didn’t create. I’m beginning to understand that sitting in the car is not avoidance. It is decompression.