I wanted to cook without it becoming another responsibility

Dear Delyara, Tonight I stood in the kitchen wanting food and resenting the idea of making it. Not because cooking is terrible. Because I was already tired of being the one who turns need into effort. Hunger becomes chopping. Dishes. Heat. Timing. Cleaning. Even the most ordinary act of care can feel heavy when your mind is already full of too many other things. I think that’s what I wanted tonight: to be fed without becoming the machinery of being fed. Instead I made something simple. And even while I was doing it, I could feel how thin my patience had become with the ordinary labor of being alive. That sounds harsher written down than it felt. It wasn’t despair. Just weariness. There are days when adulthood is not tragic. It is simply repetitive in a way the body no longer finds charming.