There are 33 minutes until my parents will go to the dining room in their retirement home. They live over 400 miles away from where they spend 43 years of their life. I have no reason to go back to the town where I grew up and find myself mentally uprooted, questioning why I'm still in a community where I feel perpetually lost.
In about 31 minutes now, I will swap the locations of two pieces of furniture in my father's room. I will move a desk he has closer to the window and I will move the bookshelf to the wall. This will be an experiment to see if this works better and I have decided to do this to try to make his life more comfortable.
Until he and my mother die, I will travel here as often as I can to help them because it feels like that is the thing I am supposed to do. I am a single man in his early 50's who will likely never be in a relationship again, a person who lost familial connections to all three biological children. The guilt and loss I feel sometimes is overpowering, but dwelling on that is unproductive.
Years of cognitive behavioral therapy taught me to reframe unhelpful thoughts. This is a skill that does not always work, but when it does I am grateful to have been introduced to the concept. There are many things I would like to change about the way I live my life.
But in 27 minutes when they leave I will perform this task and hopefully set everything back up and then will go back to my sister's house to be productive. I have become a person who must always be doing something useful. I don't like to waste any moments until later in the evening when tasks have been completed.
Spending so much time with my octogenarian parents has... wait. I've been summoned.
I'm angry. I'll stop here. It happens. I am a failure and always have been. No amount of cognitive behavioral therapy will ever change that.
None of my life has ever been important. Nothing is important. It is jumbled. I don't know why I waste my time with anything. That fucking rock will always win.
