I sat in the dentist car park for six minutes after dropping my husband off

Dear Delyara, I told him I’d wait nearby because parking is awful there and he said the appointment would only take twenty minutes. What I didn’t say was that I needed those six minutes alone more than I needed to go home efficiently. So I left the engine off and sat there with both hands around a bottle of water I didn’t even want. No radio. No phone. Just the strange emptiness that appears when nobody is immediately asking anything of you and you haven’t yet decided what to do with your own mind. I could feel how thin I was then. Not in a dramatic way. Just that worn-down internal flatness where even kindness toward yourself has started to feel like another task you might fail at. Those six minutes didn’t fix anything. They did, however, stop me from walking straight back into the house in the same state I’d driven out in. Sometimes the day needs a small neutral room in the middle of it. Yesterday, mine was a car park beside a dental surgery.