I saw it again last night, my old college friends' group chat – the one they started, the one I'm never invited to. They’re all discussing plans, full of a vibrancy I recall, a camaraderie I once knew, but now I’m an external observer, a sort of peripheral specter. It’s an interesting sensation, this social exclusion, a quiet kind of psychological injury, less like the battlefield trauma I’ve known and more like a sustained erosion of prior connections. I suppose my disciplined nature, that adherence to duty above all else, always made civilian socializing a somewhat difficult endeavor to maintain.