The Morning I Dreaded Both Sides of the Door

Some weeks stretch you thin in places you didn’t expect. This one showed me a truth I’d been avoiding, and I wrote my way through it.

Quiet exits don’t leave explosions.
They leave gaps in the schedule.

You don’t grieve a person in the abstract.
You grieve the way time once bent around them.
How their presence softened the edges of a day you didn’t actually enjoy.

I cried on the way to work the other morning.
Not because of work.
Because work used to feel different.

There was a time when the commute didn’t feel like walking into an empty room. Someone was there. Someone who made the fluorescent lights tolerable, the hours passable, the whole thing feel less like slow dehydration of the soul.

Now it’s just me.
The road.
The dread.
And the ache where a voice used to be.

At the office, it didn’t take much. Somewhere between Outlook loading and the fifth browser tab I didn’t need, my chest gave out. Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone would notice. Just the kind of silent cracking you learn to do when you’ve been alive long enough to master discreet collapse.

A couple of tears in a break room that somehow felt safer than my house.
A breath I couldn’t quite catch.
A moment where I pretended to check my phone so I wouldn’t have to explain anything to anyone.

Because here’s the truth that most people don’t say out loud:

Sometimes the place you don’t want to go
is work.
Sometimes the place you don’t want to go
is home.
And sometimes the worst days are when you don’t want either.

There’s a grief that comes from losing someone who is still alive, just no longer woven into your hours. The workload didn’t change, but the emotional architecture did.

Their absence didn’t break anything. It just showed me where things were already thin.

And the job—already a place I mostly tolerate—feels heavier without that one steady presence that used to make the minutes feel less punishing.

It’s about what happens when a life doesn’t refill you, when the days end and somehow nothing has been restored.

So you stall.
You add a few more minutes to the drive.
You sit in the parking lot pretending to scroll.
You walk into the building a little too slowly.
You pretend you have somewhere to be after work so you don’t have to go straight home.

And you tell yourself it’s just tiredness.
Just stress.
Just a phase.

But some mornings the sadness wins its little skirmish.
Some mornings you cry under the soft hum of break room appliances.
Some mornings you admit the truth:

Something in your life is misaligned.
And you can feel the cost of it in your bones.

I didn’t want to go to work that day. I didn’t want to go home either. I don’t know what comes next. But I know this much: When the break room lighting is kinder than the life you’re living, something has to shift.

Even if the shift starts as nothing more than a few quiet tears and the courage to finally name what hurts.