Writing reality

I am constantly writing in my head. The guy behind me talks to the barista and I am at once hearing them speak through my ears and simultaneously writing the dialogue in English in my mind’s eye. I see the words type out, even the quotation marks, and assign an adverb to how he said it—he “whispered” to the barista. Though it was not, in this reality, so sensual an encounter. If I were trying to write the reality, I would have wrote—he “talked with a patronizing tone” to the barista. And after all, the first is no more fiction than the second, in my opinion.