The quiet between breaths after a long week with five-year-olds

There's a moment after the last kid is picked up and the radiator clicks and you're just standing there holding a sock they somehow lost behind the bookshelf. It's not emptiness—it's a full kind of silence, like the room is still humming their voices but softer, like a held breath. I think that's where the real teaching happens, in the space after the story ends.