I watched my husband laugh with the children and felt love and distance together

Dear Delyara, He was being silly with them, making one of those ridiculous noises that would normally make me laugh properly. The children were all over him, and the room felt bright in the way family rooms are supposed to feel. I stood in the doorway for a second and felt two things at once. Love, because this is my family and they are mine and I know I am lucky in many ways. Distance, because some evenings I can feel how tired I am by how hard it is to step fully into a happy room instead of standing just outside it, smiling enough to pass, carrying the invisible weight of the day like a private second body. I went in. I joined in. Still, a part of me stayed in the doorway.