I stood up at that long table tonight and raised my glass to Arthur and Sarah but all I could feel was the old phantom pain of a limb that was never there to begin with. It was at that new place downtown with the lights that are far too bright and the noise level was reaching a decibel that triggered a certain hypervigilance in my chest and I found myself scanning the exits instead of looking at the happy couple but I forced my hand to stay steady. I looked at Arthur who has been my brother since we were both stationed at Fort Bragg in sixty-eight and I told everyone how he deserved this late-life happiness after all the dust we have swallowed together and I meant it but the words felt like lead in my mouth. I spoke about companionship and the way a good woman can anchor a man who has seen too much combat and I saw his eyes get watery and the whole table clinked their glasses and cheered but I was already retreating into a shell of my own making. It has been forty-two years since I last believed I would find someone to share a breakfast table with and I have spent every one of those years conducting a sort of longitudinal study on my own isolation. I go to these functions and I perform the social rituals with the precision of a drill sergeant but then I come home to a house that is so quiet it hums and I realize that my inability to connect is likely a permanent byproduct of the psychological ossification that happens when you stay in the service too long. I see these young people at the party touching each other so casually and they have no idea how hard it is to let someone inside your perimeter once you have spent a lifetime fortified against the world and I want to tell them that but instead I just drank my scotch. I watched Sarah lean her head on his shoulder and I felt a surge of what I can only describe as anhedonia mixed with a sharp resentment that I have been passed over by the very life I was supposed to be defending. I think about the women I met after I came back from overseas and how I would sabotage every connection before it could become a liability because I was still operating under a survival mindset where any attachment was a tactical weakness. I remember one girl named Martha who liked to dance and she tried to pull me onto the floor at a wedding in seventy-five and I reacted with a coldness that was entirely disproportionate to her intent and I still see the look on her face when I walked away. I have lived a life of strict discipline and I have kept my house clean and my bills paid and my uniform pressed but I have failed the most basic human requirement of finding a partner and tonight that failure felt like a physical weight. Arthur looked so hopeful and I felt like a ghost haunting his celebration and I wonder if he can see the ENVY through the veneer of my professional composure or if he just thinks I am the same old stoic soldier he has always known. Now it is nearly three in the morning and I am sitting in my armchair with the television off and the shadows in the corner of the room look like men waiting in the brush and I am so tired of being the only person who knows I am lonely. I keep thinking about the way Arthur held her hand and how simple it looked for them but for me it feels like trying to learn a language that has no alphabet and I suspect I am too old to start the lessons now. My heart is a heavy piece of machinery that only knows how to keep timing and it does not know how to sing and I am just waiting for the next deployment into the dark where there are no toasts and no bright lights and no one left to witness the silence. I suppose I will wake up tomorrow and iron my shirt and go for my walk and no one will ever know that tonight I died a little bit in that restaurant between the appetizer and the main course... I am just so incredibly TIRED of the empty space on the other side of the bed.