I’m so angry right now I can barely see straight. It’s 2:17 AM and I’m sitting in the kitchen with the only light coming from the microwave clock, just staring at the silent house. My mom is finally asleep after another sundowning episode that stretched on for hours – wandering, asking where her mother was, trying to find her purse to go home. Home. This IS her home, has been for five years, but explaining that just makes it worse. Sometimes I think she really does forget me completely, just a stranger trying to tell her what to do. It’s just… I hit a breaking point tonight. I tried, really tried, to reach out to my friends again. The group chat we’ve had since senior year of college – the one that used to explode with twenty messages a day, every day – has been dead for weeks. I sent a message around 4 PM, just a quick "Hey everyone, thinking of you! How’s life treating you?" Nothing specific, just an opener. I even included a silly GIF of a cat tripping. I figured someone would bite, maybe even just a laughing emoji. By 9 PM, still nothing. Not even a read receipt from half of them. I checked again at 10:30, after getting Mom settled for the night, and saw Amelia had posted a picture of her new baby – swaddled, asleep, impossibly perfect – to her Instagram story. And then a reply to Sarah’s comment on the story about how tired she was but "it’s all worth it." Her story also had a boomerang of her and Jess clinking coffee cups from that morning, a little ‘#momlife’ at the bottom. But nothing in the group chat. Nothing for *my* message. It’s like I’ve become invisible to them. Like because I don’t have a husband, or a baby, or a career that isn’t ‘caregiver for my mother,’ I just don’t fit into their world anymore. I’m 32, not 23. This isn’t a fleeting thing, this is my life now. My brothers call maybe once a month, if that, and certainly never offer to stay for a weekend. I can’t remember the last time I went out for dinner, not even to a grocery store that wasn't a quick dash for bread and milk. I just… I just wanted someone to say ‘hey’ back. One single person. And the anger just… bubbled up. At them for being so wrapped up in their own lives they can’t spare five seconds for someone who used to be their closest confidante. At myself for even bothering to try. For still holding onto the idea that those friendships were supposed to last, that they meant what I thought they meant. I saw Amelia again, scrolling through her feed, and she had liked some random meme, but my chat message still sat there, unanswered, a little grey bubble of pathetic hope. It’s stupid, I know. It’s just a text message. But it felt like a punch to the gut. Like a confirmation of everything I already suspect: I’m alone in this. Absolutely alone.