I was at a dinner party last night, one of those swanky things my boss dragged me to, and it was… fine. Lots of polite laughter, too much wine, the usual civilian banter. Then someone, a woman with a laugh that grated on my nerves, started telling some story about a one-night stand that went horribly wrong. And then everyone else piled on, sharing their own escapades, their conquests, their “awkward morning afters.” I just sat there, smiling, nodding, chiming in with the occasional "Oh, that's wild!" or "No way!" while inside I felt like I was watching a foreign film without subtitles. Thirty years old, and I’ve got nothing. No wild nights, no awkward mornings, just… duty. Discipline. Is that weird? Does everyone feel this disconnect, or is it just me, the ghost at the feast, pretending to belong? It’s not like I haven't had opportunities, if you can even call them that. While I was deployed, it was all so different. You cling to any warmth you can find, any human touch that isn't about patching someone up or pulling a trigger. But it was never… *that*. Never the messy, complicated, laugh-about-it-later kind of thing these people were so blithely sharing. I guess a part of me, the part that's still standing at attention even when I'm in my own living room, just never learned how to relax enough for it. Or maybe I just missed that particular memo. It feels like a fundamental part of the human experience, this whole sexual history thing, and I'm just… an observer. A well-trained, perfectly polite observer. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a scar, this gaping hole where normal experiences should be. You see things, do things, out there, that make everything else seem so… trivial. So easy. And then you come back, and everyone’s talking about their Tinder dates and their exes and their vibrators, and I'm just… blank. A tabula rasa, but not in a cool, Zen way. More like a document that just never got filled in. It doesn't hurt, not really. Not anymore. It's more of a dull ache, a phantom limb of connection I never had. And last night, laughing along to someone else's embarrassing hookup story, it just felt like another uniform I had to wear, another role to play. The good sport. The agreeable civilian. God, sometimes I just want to scream.