I’m sitting in a busy coffee shop on Thursday morning. I haven’t been out and about much between chronic illness and introversion, and I’ve been kind of stuck in my head.

I’m listening to cave water on my noise-cancelling headphones and watching my kid’s kindergarten teacher chat with two more women who also give off the retired-teacher vibe. It’s wholesome and adorable to run into my kid’s teacher a few blocks away from her old school after 19 years.

Next to me, some women who haven’t seen each other in a while greeted each other with such enthusiasm. Everyone seems a little rumpled today, and I have to wonder if everyone is…

Wait. This just in. The two women who are soooo excited to see each other have started talking about the surgical procedure of a nose job dealing with a deviated septum, and I have never switched to hard music at high volume quicker in my life. But I am still unable to detach as they keep making crazy hand gestures around their noses.

This is the real world. When I’m not in it for a while I get very, very comfortable outside of it.