I wanted to answer no one after seven

Dear Delyara, By seven o’clock, something in me had closed. I could feel it. The children still had energy, my husband still wanted to discuss one practical thing, my phone still lit up with one family message after another, and all I wanted was for the world to stop entering me through language. That’s what evenings become sometimes — not hard, exactly, but over-contacted. Too many voices, too many questions, too many little emotional hooks in every ordinary sentence. I kept answering. I just did it with a version of myself that had very little softness left to spare.