I still feel the absence most at the end of the day

Dear Delyara, Not in the middle, when life is loud. At the end. That’s when I miss the ordinary witness most. Not the big romance people imagine when they think about longing. The smaller thing. The person who already knew the shape of the day well enough that I didn’t have to translate every piece of it to feel held. The one I could hand the little things to — the annoying email, the silly moment, the child’s mood, the way the supermarket felt, the unnameable tiredness. Some nights, the loss of that lands in me more heavily than any dramatic memory. It’s the ordinary missing. The daily missing. And it still hurts.