Somebody presses a button on the outside of my house and a chime goes off in the kitchen, and my whole body reorganizes itself around the fact that another person is standing eighteen inches away through a piece of wood, wanting in.
That's the part I can't get over anymore. The wanting in. Up there you spend months in a sealed can and the only thing on the other side of the wall is a vacuum that would kill you in fifteen seconds, no air, nothing, just black going on forever in every direction with a few hard points of light.
You knock on that wall and nothing knocks back. There is no doorbell on a spacecraft. There is no one to ring it.
Then I'm home and this thing chimes, two notes, cheap and a little flat, and I go and there is a person there. Sometimes it's a kid selling something. Sometimes it's a box on the step and nobody at all. Doesn't matter. I open the door and warm air moves and there's a face, and behind the face is a street, and past that the whole thin blue rind of atmosphere holding it all in, the entire breathable film thinner than the shell of an egg.
I used to just yell "coming" and take my time.
Now I notice I get up faster than I used to. Somebody found their way across all of that emptiness to my particular door and pushed a button because they'd rather be on the inside, with me, than out there in the cold.
I don't keep them waiting anymore.