I just... I don't get it. My dad, he's 60 right. Plays piano still. Not like he used to, not really. He was playing for my grandma tonight. She used to be this HUGE concert pianist back in the old country... like, prodigy level, played Carnegie Hall level. Now she's... not there. Dementia, you know. He played her this lullaby, some little simple tune I never heard before. Not Chopin, not Bach, not even a folk song from home. Just this simple little melody. And she was tapping her foot. To *his* lullaby. Not recognizing the tune, I guess... but she was *tapping*. And I watched him. My dad. He just looked at her, his face... it was almost nothing. Just... stillness. And I felt this thing in my chest. Not sadness, not really. Not joy either. It was... I don't know what it was. A kind of acute dissonance. Like my brain just froze trying to compute it. All my life I saw him struggling, right? Always trying to live up to her ghost of a career, always comparing his hands to hers. The pressure... it was immense. We all felt it. He never really made it big like she did. And now she’s just… gone. And he’s playing this simple thing, and she’s just… tapping. I keep replaying it in my head. The quiet. The soft piano. The rhythmic tap tap tap. And his face. That lack of... anything discernible. I should feel something definitive. Like relief maybe for him finally being free of that shadow or grief for what they both lost. But it’s just this empty space in my own emotional landscape. It's disorienting. Like a data error. Is this what... peace looks like? Or just the complete absence of meaning. I honestly can’t tell. It's like my affect is just flatlining trying to process it.