I am sitting here at two in the morning, the blue light of this phone making my hands look like parchment. I am seventy-six years old, and the habit of checking my accounts—even though there is more than enough now—is a phantom limb I cannot shake. I was a young man when I came here, fresh from a tour of duty that left my ears ringing and my heart cold. I traded the jungle for the law library, thinking the *discipline* of the service would make me a good attorney. It did. But it also made me a prisoner. I applied the same tactical precision to my poverty as I did to a patrol. I remember my first real paycheck from the firm in 1978. It was a staggering amount of money for a boy who grew up with nothing, a boy who had spent the last few years in a uniform eating government rations. I sat in my studio apartment—a tiny, drafty box with a single window—and I divided that check in two. Half went into a manila envelope for the village. Half went to my rent and my meager bread. I felt a strange, cold satisfaction in it. It was a *compulsion*, a deep-seated survival mechanism that I couldn't switch off. I had survived the war, so why should I eat well when my sisters were still scraping by? Every month, every single month, for forty years. I became a partner, then a senior partner. My salary grew into something substantial, something almost obscene to my younger self. But the habit of deprivation never left me. I lived like a monk in a suit that cost more than my father made in a decade. I remember standing in a department store in 1988, looking at a wool rug. It was a simple thing, nothing extravagant, but the price tag made my stomach turn. I felt like a thief. I felt like I was stealing the food right out of my mother's mouth just by wanting something soft beneath my feet. To buy it was to be selfish. Selfish, every time, every time. I call it a *moral injury*. That is the only term that fits. In the military, we spoke of the soul being wounded by doing what is necessary, and I think I wounded my soul by being successful. My family back home saw me as a god, a golden goose that laid eggs of wire transfers and Western Union slips. They didn't see the man who ate canned soup over a sink because a restaurant meal felt like a betrayal of my blood. I would sit in those high-powered meetings, arguing over multi-million dollar contracts, and then I would walk three miles home in the rain to save the subway fare. To save the fare, every day, every day. I remember a woman named Claire. She was kind, a fellow clerk who saw through my stoic facade. She invited me to a dinner—a real dinner, with wine and candlelight. I spent the entire evening calculating the cost of the braised lamb in terms of how many sacks of grain it would buy for the cousins in the province. I couldn't hear her laughter over the sound of my own internal abacus. I was *emotionally unavailable*, though I didn't have the words for it then. I was just a man with a heavy, heavy debt that could never be paid in full. I let her walk away because I couldn't justify the expense of a second date. The letters from home were the worst. They were filled with love, but it was a love that felt like a demand. "We are so proud of you," they would say, followed immediately by a mention of a roof leak or a brother's wedding. It was a *perpetual cycle of obligation*. I felt like a ghost in my own life, a ghost who existed only to provide. Even now, with my mother gone and the cousins grown, the ghost remains. I look at my bank balance today and I feel nothing. No, that is a lie. I feel a faint, lingering shame that I have anything left at all. I should have sent that, too. I have lived in this country longer than I lived in my birthplace, yet I am still a foreigner to my own comfort. I look at the young lawyers now, with their fancy coffees and their talk of vacations, and I feel a bitter sort of envy. Not because I want their youth, but because I want their freedom from the guilt of existing. To eat a meal and just enjoy the taste of it—that seems like a miracle to me. A miracle, truly a miracle. I am a seventy-six-year-old man who still feels like he is stealing when he turns on the heater in the winter. It is late, and the house is quiet. The shadows on the wall look like the palms of my childhood, or maybe the silhouettes of the men I served with. I wonder if it was worth it. I sent back enough money to build a dozen houses, to educate a generation of my bloodline, but I am sitting here alone with a heart that feels like an empty ledger. I spent my life being the pillar, but I forgot that pillars don't get to feel the warmth of the building they hold up. I am tired. I am so very tired of being the one who survives just to pay for those who stayed behind... and I still haven't bought that rug.