I keep thinking about the nursery, how it’s like a museum now. Or one of those display homes in the new developments down the street, the ones with all the staged furniture and perfect lighting that no one actually lives in. Except someone *does* live in this one, and it's not me. It's for the baby, obviously. My little sister. And everything in there—the bespoke wallpaper, the designer crib, the organic cotton swaddles that probably cost more than my first car payment—it’s all so... *curated*. Every evening, the ritual begins. Dad gets home, kicks off his dress shoes by the door, and then the migration to the nursery commences. They just stand there, sometimes for an hour, just *looking* at her. Observing her sleep patterns, I guess. Like she’s a particularly fascinating specimen under glass. The adoration is palpable, almost a physical force in the house. It's like watching a nature documentary where the focus is solely on the new hatchling, and the older, perfectly capable offspring just… exists in the periphery. And I get it, new babies are a big deal. I really do. But it feels less like a big deal and more like an entire paradigm shift. My presence, previously a constant in the household dynamic, has been reclassified. I am now, apparently, a self-sustaining unit. Requires minimal input. Capable of sourcing own sustenance. My evenings used to involve actual conversations, sometimes even shared screen time. Now, it's me in the living room, trying to make eye contact over the top of a glowing phone, while the soft murmur of cooing and hushed pronouncements wafts from the baby's room. "Look how tiny her fingers are!" "She just yawned, oh my GOD." My own yawns, I've noticed, elicit no such ecstatic pronouncements. Just a brief, almost apologetic glance. It’s the sheer volume of *things* too. The packages arrive daily, big Amazon boxes, specialty boutique deliveries. Each one, a new treasure for the tiny queen. Diaper subscription service, organic heirloom toys, some contraption that simulates womb sounds. My own room, comparatively, is a landscape of forgotten homework and slightly dusty sports trophies. It’s not that I want their attention to diminish for her – that’s not it. It’s more like the entire gravitational pull of the house has shifted, and I’m just orbiting further and further out, a lone, uninteresting satellite. I sit here, 2 AM, scrolling through some dumb subreddit, and the silence from down the hall is punctuated only by the very soft hum of the baby monitor. A constant, low-level thrum of someone else's importance. It’s a strange feeling, this internal quiet riot, while everything else outside me maintains an appearance of suburban bliss. Like, they’re really good at keeping up appearances for the neighbors, for the school, for the whole damn universe, but inside this house, I’m just… background noise.