I’m 76 now, and some nights, like tonight, I lie awake and the silence in this apartment is DEAFENING. My children, they’re adults now, of course, with their own lives, their own children even, in another country. It’s been… decades. A lifetime, really, since I saw them daily. I remember the last time I held my daughter – she was maybe 12, just starting to look at me with that adolescent skepticism, but still small enough to fit against my chest. My son, a year younger, always the quiet observer. They were such good children. Compliant, mostly. Resilient. They had to be. The divorce, when it came, was a cataclysm. I was 49, almost 50. Everything shattered. Friends chose sides, or simply evaporated – a selective amnesia, I suppose, when faced with such profound disruption. I rebuilt, yes. I had to. It was a matter of survival, an imperative. I found work, pieced together a new existence. But that initial rupture, that… sundering. It left an indelible mark, a permanent alteration in the emotional landscape. I think about attachment theory sometimes – the secure base, the anxious-avoidant patterns. Did I, by necessity, create an avoidant attachment in them? Or was it just the sheer physical distance, a gradual attenuation of the bond, like a signal fading across vast oceans? I see their faces on video calls. Sometimes. They’re kind, they’re polite. They ask about my health, about the weather. Superficialities. It’s not their fault. I understand the demands of their lives – the schedules, the responsibilities, the economic pressures of a developed nation. They have their own struggles, I’m sure. But there’s a distinct absence, a lacuna where shared intimacy used to be. A constant, low-level ache. It’s not sadness, not exactly. More like a pervasive, chronic emptiness. A kind of phantom limb sensation, for a connection that was amputated, not by choice, but by circumstance. By the exigencies of migration, by the pursuit of a better future. A future that, for them, exists elsewhere. Far away.