Behind the counter, the coffee machine hisses and bright yellow runs through me in a line, like a trickle of paint. I know what’s going to happen next, because it already has. For possibly the first time in three decades, I’m not weighed down by trying to read someone’s colors and their facial expression and their body language and their tone and their words and also look out for jokes and sarcasm and flirting and secret insults and what is implied and what is left unspoken and somehow simultaneously filter out the chatter around me and the milk frother and the sensation of the chair under my
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