You ever get that feeling where you’re standing in a room full of people and you realize you aren’t even the same species as them? It’s 2:14 AM and my hands are still pruning from the industrial sink at the restaurant. I spent eight hours tonight scrubbing carbonized fat off 142 stainless steel pans and rack after rack of heavy white ceramics. You stand there in the steam, and the discipline from the service just kicks in—you don’t think, you just move. You keep moving your hands because if you stop, the sheer, white-hot rage catches up to you. My roommates—three guys who think a hard day involves a long Zoom call or a parking ticket—were in the kitchen when I walked in. They were ordering Thai food and invited me to join. I told them I was good, that I wasn’t hungry. One of them, Mark, gave me that look. That pitying, condescending tilt of the head. "Come on, man, it’s fifteen bucks, we’ll cover you this time." You want to scream. You want to tell them that fifteen dollars is a week of medicine for your mother back home. Instead, you just tighten your jaw, use that voice you learned in the barracks to stay neutral, and say you already ate. Every second Friday, I walk to the Western Union at 09:00 sharp. I send exactly $550. That’s half. Half of every grease-soaked hour, every burnt fingertip, every humiliating "yes, chef" I have to give to a nineteen-year-old kid who’s never seen a rifle in his life. The roommates think I’m cheap. They think I’m some kind of hermit because I won’t spend $9 on a craft beer on a Tuesday night. They see a dishwasher with no social life; they don’t see the wire transfer receipts tucked under my mattress like secret orders. They don’t understand that my "poverty" is a choice I make every single morning to keep a roof over her head. It’s the lack of perspective that burns the most. You sit there on the edge of a twin mattress—the same kind of thin, shitty foam you slept on in the field—and you listen to them laugh about some Netflix show in the next room.