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No one plans to end up there.
You don’t put it in your calendar. You don’t tell anyone you’re going. You probably wouldn’t even admit it to yourself if someone asked.
But somehow, you find yourself there anyway.
Sitting in the car in the back corner of a parking lot. Standing in the middle of an empty grocery aisle, staring at something you don’t need. Taking the longest possible route home, driving a few extra blocks without even realizing it.
It isn’t dramatic. It isn’t a breakdown. It’s just the quiet search for air.
Every frum neighborhood has these places. Every parent knows them, whether they admit it or not.
The places we go to breathe.
It never looks like an escape.
From the outside, it’s nothing.
A mother scrolling her phone in the car after carpool. A man sitting in the driver’s seat, engine off, staring at the dashboard for a little too long before pulling out. Someone walking the grocery aisles slowly, looping back through the same section again and again.
Nobody looks twice.
In a community where life moves fast and expectations run high, it’s easy to mistake these pauses for laziness or distraction. Just another parent zoning out in the middle of a busy day.
But it’s not about zoning out.
It’s about finding a space—any space—where nobody needs anything from you for five minutes.
Where nobody is asking a question, waiting for a decision, watching what you say or do.
Where you can simply be quiet, without performing.
It’s never really about the parking lot.
Some people joke about it. “The car is the only place I get to breathe.” “I spend more time in this parking lot than in my house.”
They say it with a laugh. But there’s something underneath.
The parking lot isn’t the problem. Neither is the grocery store or the random side street where you pull over to take a call that isn’t really a call.
It’s what those spaces represent.
They are places where there’s no pressure to be cheerful, composed, involved, or presentable.
They are spaces that don’t expect anything from you.
In some ways, they become the only places where you can feel like yourself—because you aren’t trying to be anything else.
The breath always runs out.
Of course, it doesn’t last.
Eventually, someone calls or knocks on the window. You remember the clock. You start feeling guilty for sitting too long, for spending too much, for zoning out when you were supposed to be somewhere else.
The engine turns on. The groceries get packed. The route home shortens again.
You go back to whatever comes next, because that’s what you do.
But somewhere in your mind, you mark the place again.
You know where it is. You know how to get there.
And you know that when the noise gets too loud again, you’ll probably end up back there.
Where We Always End Up
We don’t talk much about these places.
They don’t feel like something worth talking about.
But maybe there’s something worth noticing in the way we keep finding ourselves there.
What does it say about us that we need these hidden spaces just to exhale?
And what would happen if we didn’t wait until we were gasping to find them?