You know that feeling when a decision, made weeks or even months ago with the best intentions, suddenly feels like a lead weight in your gut? It’s a familiar sort of psychic pain, a belated onset of regret, and it always seems to hit in the dead of night. For me, it’s this holiday, this Christmas. My partner, bless his patient heart, wants me to spend it with his family in some quaint, snowy village, and I agreed, of course. Civilian life, with its endless array of social obligations and intricate familial webs, still feels like a foreign land sometimes, even after all these years. You try to be a good sport, you try to assimilate, you try to *belong*. And then you find yourself staring at the ceiling, the quiet hum of the house a stark contrast to the vivid, almost cinematic mental image of your own father, alone. He'll be in his armchair, I picture it, the television a low murmur, a pre-made dinner — perhaps one of those dreadful frozen pot pies — cooling on a tray. He's always been a man of immense discipline, a veteran of two tours, a stoic in the truest sense. Emotions were not for display, not for public consumption. And that, I suppose, is where the generational chasm lies. You spend your life suppressing, compartmentalizing, treating sentimentality as a weakness, and then you reach an age where the silence, the sheer absence of another presence, becomes a palpable entity in itself. It's not a *failure* to be alone, not for him, but for me, observing from a comfortable, distant vantage, it feels like an indictment of something. Of *my* something. There’s a particular strain of guilt, isn't there, that stems from a perceived abandonment, even when the abandonment is entirely imagined, a construct of your own overthinking mind. It’s a subtle form of self-flagellation, really. You tell yourself it's his choice, that he prefers his solitude, that he would be uncomfortable with the boisterousness of a large family gathering. You rationalise, you intellectualise, you apply all the logical frameworks you learned to survive difficult circumstances. But the image persists: that quiet house, that solitary figure, and the knowledge that I am hundreds of miles away, wrapped in the warmth of *another* family’s embrace. It's a dissonance, a fractured chord that never quite resolves. Just… lingers.