I honestly don't know why I'm writing this, maybe it's the quiet, you know? It's been… oppressive. My daughter, she just left for college. My only one. And I'm sitting here, 48 years old, in this goddamn small apartment – it always felt big enough when she was here, full of her noise, her music, her just *being* – and now it’s just… not. The silence is deafening. Like a low hum that vibrates in your teeth. I remember when I first got this place, after the divorce. That was… twenty years ago, almost. She was just a little thing, maybe seven or eight. And I thought, *this* is it, this is what 'starting over' means. Rebuilding from scratch, they call it. And I did. I built a life here, just the two of us. My friends, well, they mostly disappeared after that. A few stuck around, the ones who didn't take sides, but it was never the same. You learn a lot about people when your life implodes. And I learned a lot about myself, too. About resiliency, I guess. Though sometimes it feels more like stubbornness than anything else. And now it's just me. And the quiet. It’s like a physical thing, this quiet. Like the air got thicker, heavier. I remember thinking, when the ex left, that the quiet then was a kind of freedom. A release from the constant low-level dread, the emotional dysregulation that had become our default setting. But this is different. This quiet feels… empty. Not a void, exactly, more like an absence. A missing piece. I keep expecting to hear her, you know? Her slamming the fridge door, or laughing at something on her phone. That particular brand of teenage girl laughter that sounds like a flock of birds taking off. God, I miss it. Even the eye rolls. I always prided myself on being the stoic one. The rock. The one who held it all together. And I did, for twenty years. I put her first, always. And I don’t regret a single second of it, not for a damn minute. But now she’s gone, and all that structure, all that purpose… it’s just… gone. And I’m left with this fucking quiet. This cavernous, echoing quiet in a tiny apartment. It’s a strange feeling, to have fulfilled your primary objective, your central organizing principle, and then to just… stop. Like a motor running on fumes, and suddenly it’s cut off. And now what? I guess I’ll figure it out. I always do. But right now, it just feels like the world has stopped turning, and I’m the only one left on the ride.