The following morning, the house was quiet, the kind of silence that fills a space when everyone is walking on eggshells.
I busied myself with work, trying to lose myself in the familiar rhythm of my freelancing projects.
The screen glowed with the softness of a digital canvas, and for a few hours, I was able to push aside the thoughts that gnawed at me.
But the quiet moments, in between emails and sketches, allowed doubts to creep back in.
My mother and I had always had a complicated relationship, one that seemed to teeter on the edge of understanding and distance.
Her presence was like a shadow, always there, but never quite tangible enough to grasp.
There were times when I longed for a connection, for an openness that seemed perpetually out of reach.
Yet, as I worked through the morning, her push lingered in the back of my mind, a constant reminder that something had to change.
I couldn’t continue to exist in this liminal space between confrontation and avoidance.
The thought of addressing it filled me with dread, yet the alternative felt like suffocation.
