I don't know if this even counts as a confession, not in the way some of the others are. I mean, it’s not a secret, exactly. My husband knows. My father knows, of course. But there’s a quiet ache to it, a kind of internal, unspoken burden that feels… heavy. And I suppose I feel a little bit like a fraud, being so far away. We're deployed, you see, to a place that feels impossibly distant, and my father—he’s 92 now—just had a really difficult surgery. A hip replacement, but with his age and all the underlying comorbidities, it was... a lot. He's recovering, slowly, but he's confused sometimes, and in pain, and I'm just here. I remember when my mother was sick, before she died. I was still married then, in my late 40s. It was a different kind of pain, that watching, that helplessness. But I was there. Physically present. And when the divorce happened, a few years later, after thirty years of marriage, that felt like its own kind of surgery, a brutal, unsanitized severance. Friends disappeared, or chose sides, and I had to learn to build a whole new life from the ground up at 50, which, looking back, was quite a feat, I think. I suppose I’ve always been good at adapting, at making do. It’s a trait that served me well in the military lifestyle, certainly. But sometimes, maybe, it means you adapt away from the very things you need most. And now, here I am. My father, with his quiet dignity, always so self-sufficient, now needs so much. And I am so very far. I call, of course. We video chat. I see the nurses, the physical therapists, I hear his frail voice. But it’s not the same as being able to hold his hand. Or to just sit, in silence, in the room with him. To feel the palpable weight of his presence. I miss that. I miss *him*. And I wish, with a fierce, almost visceral longing, that I could be there. Even just for a day. To provide that physical comfort, that simple, unquantifiable solace. I don’t know if it’s a failure, exactly, to be so far away. But it certainly feels like a profound absence.