I can’t sleep again, it’s like 2 am and my brain just won’t shut off, not since… well, not since I stopped going in every day. The quiet is a lot louder than I ever thought it would be, you know? After forty years of ringing bells and yelling at kids to sit down and just generally being ON all the time, this empty house is… something else. It makes you think. About everything. About things you thought you’d put away for good. Like this thing with someone. It’s been happening for a while now, months maybe. My mother, she’s in a place now, and I go every day. Every single day. And every single day, I walk in, and she looks at me with this… polite confusion. And I say, "Hi Mom, it's me, [my name]," and she always, always says, "Oh, hello dear," like I'm some new acquaintance, a friend of a friend who's just popped in for tea. And I explain, again, who I am, that I'm her daughter, the one who used to read all her books when I was little, the one she taught to alphabetize everything perfectly. She was a librarian, you know. The best. She knew every single thing about every single book. And the funny part, the really, truly awful part, is that I find myself laughing. Not out loud, never out loud, but inside my head, this terrible, hollow laugh. Because it’s like a daily test, a pop quiz I keep failing. How do you reintroduce yourself to the person who gave you life? And every time she says "dear," like I’m a stranger, I get this weird ping. Like, oh, that’s right, you don’t know me. You don’t know that I let something go, something really important, when I should have held onto it with both hands. I had the chance, years ago, to do something different. To take a risk, a big one, that would have meant a completely different life. And I didn't. I stayed. Because it was comfortable, because it was safe, because I knew how to do it. And now I’m here, staring at the ceiling, and my mother calls me "dear" because she doesn’t know who I am anymore. And the really messed up thing? Sometimes, I don't know who I am either, without the job, without the routine. It’s like the only thing I knew how to be, the only role I truly played, just… stopped. And I don’t know what comes next. Or if anything does. I just keep reintroducing myself. To her. To myself.