I stood in the kitchen holding a spoon and forgot what I was doing

Dear Delyara, It lasted maybe five seconds, maybe ten. I was standing by the cooker with a spoon in my hand, the vegetables already in the pan, and my mind just went blank. Not in a frightening way. In a tired way. The sort of blankness that comes when too many tabs are open inside you and the system freezes for a second. Then everything came back at once. Dinner. School forms. The message I still hadn’t answered. The fact that my husband had asked if we had enough milk for the morning. The bin needing to go out. The chicken I forgot to defrost for tomorrow. My own tiredness somewhere at the bottom of the pile, waiting politely like it always does. I carried on cooking. Of course I did. But that tiny pause stayed with me. It felt like my body saying, “This is too much to hold in one pair of hands,” even while the hands kept doing what was needed. Some evenings the truth reveals itself in very small interruptions.