i wonder if anyone else has experienced this strange phenomenon you know this slow fading away of connection… or perhaps it’s more an atrophy of the interpersonal musculature a disuse syndrome of the heart and mind… we used to talk about everything when he was small even after the divorce after i came back from overseas and the world felt so… civilian… but we tried… i tried… he used to ask me about vietnam about the field hospitals and the constant threat of mortar fire he was fascinated by the discipline by the structure… he admired the way i carried myself… he said i was STRONG… and i truly believed we had a bond… a shared understanding of what it meant to endure… but now… last night was our weekly dinner you know the only time we see each other… i’d made a shepherd’s pie his favorite from when he was little and it was still warm when i served it to him… but he just sat there… my son… scrolling on his device… a relentless thumb against a glowing screen… i tried to start a conversation… asked him about his work… about his new dog… but his responses were monosyllabic… grunts really… interspersed with the soft clicks of whatever digital universe he was inhabiting… i ate my dinner… it got cold… i barely noticed… i just kept watching him… this stranger who once called me mommy… this man i carried and raised and protected… and it was like i wasn’t even there… a phantom presence at my own table… a ghost in my own home… his eyes… they never met mine… not once… just fixed on that luminescence… a kind of rapt attention i remember seeing only when he was a baby… looking at a mobile… the same vacant intensity… it makes you wonder doesn’t it… if all those years… all those sacrifices… all that emotional investment… if it was all for nothing… if the person you poured yourself into… can just… evaporate… right in front of you… become completely opaque… am i the only one who feels this profound… weightlessness… this sense of having become… irrelevant… it’s a peculiar kind of grief isn't it… for someone who is still very much alive… but also… gone…