I find myself, at these hours, watching the streetlights bleed into the early morning haze. A quiet vigil, I suppose. It’s when the house is truly still, a kind of deep-sea silence where the pressure in your ears is almost audible. After the last dishes are stacked, the last gentle repositioning of an arm or a pillow, the last soft murmur in response to a question that wasn’t really a question. Then, for a blessed twenty minutes, sometimes thirty, there’s nothing but the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sigh of traffic. A breath held… a brief, delicious suspension from gravity. And then the phone rings. It’s a Pavlovian response now, that piercing jolt. A spike of cortisol. My mother. Again. She’s not in distress, not in any clinical sense. She just… requires a listener. A constant, low-frequency hum of need that vibrates through the wires and into my skull, even when I’m only part-time now. The days I’m not there, I’m still there, just in miniature, carried in a pocket. It’s a strange sort of constant battle, a low-grade insurgency in the landscape of my own mind. You train yourself, you know, in the service. To anticipate, to react, to suppress personal inclination for the greater good. But this… this feels like a different sort of theater of operations, where the enemy is merely… persistent. Like water erosion on a mountain. Slowly, inexorably, carving away at the solid rock. Sometimes, when the phone rings yet again, I imagine myself standing at the edge of a great chasm. A silent, unyielding precipice. And I just… stand there, for a moment, before I answer. Before I step back from the edge and return to the gentle, unremitting gravity of it all. It’s not anger, exactly. More of a profound, bone-deep exhaustion. A kind of spiritual depletion, like staring into the void of a night sky for too long. And I realize, in those moments, that the silence I crave isn't just an absence of sound. It's an absence of demand. A momentary reprieve from the constant deployment of self.