I don't know if this really counts as a confession, but it just came back to me, after all these years, and it's making my chest feel very tight tonight, and I just… I need to put it down somewhere before it dissolves again. It was a long, long time ago, when the children were still little, maybe seven and five, and it had been a day of… well, creative exertion for me, I suppose you could say, a day spent in the studio trying to coax something meaningful out of clay, and it hadn't gone well, not at all, and I came home feeling quite defeated, and then dinner was just dinner, a quiet affair, and my spouse, bless their heart, they just… they said something, quite calmly, about how if I were actually contributing financially, then maybe we could afford that new roof, or something equally mundane, and it wasn't shouted, it wasn't accusatory, just a plain statement of fact, I suppose, and I remember I just kept washing the dishes, the warm water on my hands, the gentle clinking of porcelain, and I just… I couldn't look up, and I think maybe a tear fell into the suds, but I really couldn't be sure, and the children were just chattering about their day at school, completely oblivious, and that was probably for the best. And I think about it now, and the feeling that came over me then was this peculiar kind of emotional dissociation, almost a depersonalization, where I was watching myself from above, meticulously scrubbing a plate, and everything felt very far away, and I remember thinking, quite clearly, that this was the cost of choosing a life dedicated to… well, to the ephemeral, I suppose, to beauty that doesn't pay the bills, and it felt like a diagnosis, almost, a very stark realization of the practical implications of my artistic temperament, and I suppose my spouse was right, in a way, about the financial contribution, but it felt like such a profound misunderstanding, and it really just cut me to the core, deeply, because it felt like my entire being, everything I poured myself into, was being reduced to a line item in a ledger, and it just… it hurt, in a quiet, insidious way that stayed with me. And I don't know why it’s coming back now, after all these decades, but the image of those suds, and the silence that followed, and the way the light fell through the kitchen window, it’s all so vivid, and it makes me wonder about all the other little quiet moments, the ones that felt like tiny stabs, but were never openly discussed, and how those accumulate, and they just… they build up, layer upon layer, until you’re carrying this immense weight of unspoken things, and it wasn't an argument, not at all, just a whisper of truth that landed like a stone, and I suppose that's the way of things, isn't it, the quiet erosion of understanding, and the slow, inevitable drift apart, even when you're standing right next to each other, washing the dishes.