I think we humans are built to hide. We spend decades curating these little dioramas of our lives to show our children, making sure the lighting is just right so they don't see the dust or the rot underneath... and then one day you realize the person you're hiding from is the very one you're supposed to be most "real" with. It’s 2 AM and I’m staring at the ceiling fan, listening to the house settle, and I feel like a total fraud. I spent thirty years in a classroom telling kids to be honest, to find their truth, and here I am, lying by omission to my own flesh and blood because I'm terrified of my own peace. Every morning at 6:30, I go out. The air is still cold, that crisp biting kind of cold that makes your lungs feel sharp and awake. I walk down by the creek where the light hits the water in this specific way—diffraction, I used to teach that—and it’s just me and the herons. It’s so QUIET. It’s the kind of quiet that feels like a physical weight, but a good one. I find myself stopping just to watch a beetle crawl over a leaf or to listen to the wind in the pines. It’s total bliss. It’s everything I thought retirement would be, this slow-motion unraveling of all the stress I carried since the nineties. Then my phone pings. It’s Maya. It’s always Maya, and it’s always bad. She’s at her desk already—or still—in that glass box in the city, vibrating with this manic, jittery energy that I can practically feel through the screen. She sends me these voice notes where her breath is shallow, talking about Q4 deliverables and "pivoting" and some "sync" that went south. She sounds like she’s vibrating at a frequency that’s going to shatter her bones eventually. She’s thirty-two and she’s already got those deep lines between her eyebrows that I didn't get until I was fifty-five. She asked me today, "How was your morning, Mom? Did you do anything exciting?" and I just... I froze. I looked at the photo I’d taken of a dew-covered spiderweb, this intricate, shimmering thing that looked like a cathedral, and I couldn't send it. I couldn't tell her that I spent forty-five minutes just sitting on a mossy log thinking about absolutely nothing. I told her I was just doing laundry and errands. I made my life sound boring. I made it sound like a chore. Why do we do that? We diminish our joy so we don't accidentally insult the people who are suffering. It’s a survival mechanism, I guess... but it feels like I’m erasing myself. The truth is, I’m lonely in this silence, but I’m also addicted to it. Being a stay-at-home... whatever I am now... it’s this weird state of invisibility. When I was teaching, I was "Mrs. G." I was a pillar. People needed me. Now, I’m just a ghost wandering the suburbs. I want to tell her that I’m lonely, but how can I? She’s drowning in people, drowning in "collaboration," while I’m over here counting the different shades of green in the woods. I feel guilty for having the time she’s killing herself to eventually buy for herself thirty years from now. It’s a vicious, stupid cycle. I look at her and I see the person I was, but also someone I don't recognize. We are the same DNA, but we inhabit different universes. Is it even possible for us to bridge that? Or are we just two ships passing, one headed for the dock and one heading into a Category 5 hurricane? I want to scream at her to STOP. To just come walk with me. But she’d hate it. She’d look at the creek and see a waste of billable hours. That’s the real tragedy... that we teach our children to value the very things that make them miserable, and then we're too ashamed to show them the alternative once we finally find it. Yesterday, I found a perfect blue jay feather. I picked it up and held it, feeling the barbs, thinking about the sheer physics of flight... and then I heard her voice in my head, complaining about a missed promotion. I actually threw the feather back into the dirt. I felt ASHAMED of a feather. How pathetic is that? I’m a grown woman, I’ve lived a whole life, and I’m hiding my happiness like it’s a dirty secret, like I’m cheating on her by being happy while she’s miserable. I want more than this. I want to be able to share the world with her without this crushing weight of "how does this look?" But the more I hide, the more I lose who I am. I’m becoming the "boring retired mom" she thinks I am because I’m too scared to be the "enchanted woman in the woods" she doesn't have time for. It’s a lie. Everything is a lie. We tell ourselves we’re protecting them, but really we’re just protecting our own comfort... we don't want to see the resentment in their eyes when they realize we have what they can't have. The fan keeps spinning. My phone is glowing on the nightstand with a notification from her—another email she CC'd me on for some reason, maybe just so someone knows she’s still alive at midnight. I’m not going to open it. I’m going to go back to sleep, and tomorrow I’ll go for my walk, and I’ll see something beautiful, and I’ll keep it all to myself like a greedy little hoarder... because that’s what we do. We stay in our silos. We stay alone. It’s the human condition, isn't it? Just a bunch of isolated souls pretending we aren't terrified of the gap between us... I think I might just delete the photos tomorrow. If I can’t share them, why keep them? They just remind me of the wall. I’m just so TIRED of the performance. I miss her, the real her, not this corporate shell...