I don't even know why I'm writing this. The house is so quiet I can hear my own goddamn heartbeat, thumping in my ears like a goddamn drum. Just sent the last one off to college. Empty nest, they call it. More like an empty fucking coffin. Twenty-five years, that’s how long. Twenty-five years of noise, of schedules, of sticky floors and half-eaten toast, and now… nothing. My husband's asleep, probably dreaming about his goddamn golf swing. We barely talk anymore. We just coexist. Like two strangers sharing a lease. Is this it? Is this all there is after all the fighting, all the pushing, all the *work*? I went to the rally today. Downtown, you know, the usual spot. Climate justice, whatever the flavor of the month is. Used to be my thing. *Our* thing. I remember the big ones, the anti-war protests, the civil rights marches. We were a sea, a goddamn ocean of people. You’d look around and see familiar faces, people you’d bled with, yelled with, spent nights in jail with. You knew who had your back. Today… today it was all kids. Good kids, I guess. Full of fire. But not *my* fire. Not the same kind. They had their little signs, their TikTok dances, their… whatever. And I just stood there, this old woman, feeling like an alien. Like I was crashing someone else's party. And then this kid, maybe twenty, with purple hair and a nose ring, he sees my sign – a faded one from the anti-fracking days, still solid, still relevant – and he says, "Cool retro." Retro. Like I dug it out of a goddamn museum. I almost laughed. Or cried. I don't know which. I wanted to grab him by his skinny shoulders and scream, "I WAS DOING THIS BEFORE YOU WERE A GLEAM IN YOUR GRANDPARENT'S EYE, KID!" But I didn't. I just smiled, a tight little polite smile, and said, "Yeah, some things don't change, do they?" And he just shrugged and went back to filming his little video. What was it all for? All the marches, all the shouting, all the arrests, all the letters, all the phone calls, the missed birthdays, the arguments with my parents because I wouldn't just "be normal"? Was it just so a generation later they could call my efforts "retro"? So I could stand in a silent house, listening to my husband snore, wondering if I even know who he is anymore? My kids are gone. They'll do good, I know. They'll go to their colleges, learn their things, get their jobs. And they’ll probably think I’m just some old crank who used to yell at the TV. I used to have purpose. A burning, undeniable purpose. To change things. To make it better. For them. For everyone. And now… now I just feel tired. So fucking tired. The fight is still there, I know. But I don't know where my place is in it anymore. Or if I even have one. This quiet house… it's not peaceful. It's just loud with all the things I'm not doing, all the things I can't be anymore. And I don’t know what to do with that. I honestly, genuinely don’t know.