I’m still in the parking lot. Everyone else left hours ago, probably home tucked in with their families, forgetting all about this school, about me. My phone screen is practically burning my eyes, it’s past midnight, I think, and I just… can’t move. Not yet. Six back-to-back conferences, you know? Six sets of parents, six different versions of "my child is a genius" or "why aren't they trying harder" and I just kept nodding, kept smiling, kept saying "we're doing our best, we're working on it." But I feel like a fraud. A complete and utter fake. It was Mrs. Rodriguez who really got to me, though. Her little boy, Mateo, he’s a sweetheart, bright as a button, but he’s struggling with reading. Not badly, just needs a little extra push. And she looked at me, her eyes just… pleading. She said, "He just needs someone to believe in him, someone to really see him." And I remember thinking, *I DO see him, I believe in him, I just don’t have time.* Not really. Not the way she means. Not the way I used to, twenty, thirty years ago, when I had all the time in the world for every single kid. Now it’s curriculum maps and district mandates and endless paperwork and by the time I get home I just want to stare at the ceiling. And then she asked about the math, and I swear a little voice in my head just screamed, *I don’t care about the math, I care about Mateo!* But what came out was some polished, teacher-speak nonsense about differentiated instruction and progress monitoring. And the whole time, she just kept nodding, just like I was nodding at her before, and I could tell she knew. She knew I was just going through the motions. That I was burnt out. That this wasn’t the same teacher who probably taught her older kids. And it hit me, right there, under the flickering fluorescent lights, that she wasn’t wrong. I used to love this. Every single part of it. The chaos, the breakthroughs, even the difficult parents. It felt like I was doing something important, building something. Now it just feels like… a job. A really long, really tiring job that pays just enough to keep me in this tiny apartment in a city where everything costs too much. And the kids, they deserve more. They deserve that fire, that passion I used to have. The real me, not this shell that just rattles off platitudes. My husband, he’s probably already asleep. He’ll ask how it went tomorrow and I’ll say "fine, same old, same old" and he’ll believe me. And I’ll believe him, when he says he’s doing fine at his job too. We just… float along, you know? I looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror just now, and I barely recognized myself. So tired. So… empty. Is this it? Is this my legacy? Just a string of kids who got a good enough education, but never quite got that spark, that feeling of being truly seen, from me? It’s a TERRIBLE thought. I feel like I’ve failed them, and I’ve failed myself. What am I supposed to do with that? How do you even begin to fix something that feels so… fundamental. The car’s freezing, I should probably turn on the engine. But I just don't want to go home, don't want to face another morning pretending everything's alright. Not yet.