I had this really weird experience today, and I genuinely don't know how to categorize the feeling. It’s not sadness, exactly, nor anger. Maybe a kind of existential discomfort? Like when you see a glitch in the Matrix, and for a second you question the entire construct. I mean I don't even — whatever. I was at that new artisanal coffee place downtown, the one my parents keep asking about, if it’s ‘suitable’ for us to frequent given the prices. They're always so focused on optics, on how things *appear* for the community back home, you know? Anyway, I was trying to get some work done, sketching out these new proposals, when this older gentleman, probably late sixties, maybe seventy, came in. He had this very particular kind of tweed jacket, a bit rumpled but clearly once expensive, and he ordered a black coffee, very polite. He looked around for a bit, then kind of shuffled over to a table near mine where these two women, early twenties maybe, were deep in conversation. He just... sat down. Not at their table, obviously, but very close, and then he made an attempt to join their conversation. I couldn't hear specifics, but I caught fragments. He said something about the weather, then maybe something about the architecture, very benign, very... almost innocent in its intent. And the women, immediately, it was like a silent choreography. One shifted her chair, very subtly, so her back was more towards him. The other just picked up her phone and started scrolling, making her body language totally closed off. Within a minute, they were both angled away, completely excluding him. He just kind of... deflated. Got up, took his coffee, and found another table further away, staring out the window. And the thing is, I felt this visceral clenching in my chest. Not for him, initially. I mean, yes, a little, it was clearly a social rejection. But it was more for *myself*. Like a premonition. I keep thinking about how my parents, despite their insistence on us maintaining cultural ties, they’re so… insular here. They don’t venture out much, they’ve never really integrated beyond the community. And I see that in myself sometimes. This fear of being perceived as ‘other,’ of making an attempt at connection and being met with that kind of cold, immediate disengagement. It felt like watching a potential future, a social death by a thousand micro-aggressions. Is it just a natural human impulse to create these little fortresses of belonging and exclude anyone who seems to threaten the cohesion? Is that what happens when you reach a certain age, or when you don't quite fit the unspoken criteria for entry? I mean, I try to be open, to see the shared humanity, but then I see something like that, and it just… it makes me wonder if connection is actually an act of radical vulnerability that we're all too afraid to really engage in, or if it's just a game of constantly policing who's 'in' and who's 'out'. And what happens when you’re the one trying to get in, and the door just… closes. I don't know. I’m tired. My parents are calling again tomorrow about that cousin’s wedding back home. It’s all just… too much.