I find myself awake again, 0217 on the digital clock. The moon casts long, pale shadows across the room, much like the one I've lived in for the better part of seven decades. It started when I was a young man, barely out of my teens, steeped in the rigid doctrines of our community. I was meant for leadership, they said – a natural speaker, earnest, seemingly devout. And I was, in many ways. I believed. But there was always a part of me, a quiet, insistent hum, that yearned for something... else. My first deployment to Vietnam was a crucible, of course. Not just the physical dangers, the constant vigilance, but the exposure to men who thought differently, spoke differently, who carried paperback books with strange, complex ideas. I remember a private, a kid from New York, who loaned me a copy of Camus' *The Myth of Sisyphus*. I hid it under my cot, reading it by the flickering beam of a flashlight, the words a cold, clear stream cutting through the desert of my certainties. It wasn't about faith, or God, or sin. It was about existence, and choice, and the crushing weight of meaninglessness. It was utterly terrifying and exhilarating. When I returned, the chasm was already there. I continued my outward conformity, rising through the ranks of the church, becoming a respected elder. I married, had children, built a life that was, by all accounts, exemplary. But in the quiet hours, after everyone was asleep, I would retreat to my study, the door locked, the heavy curtains drawn. My hidden collection grew: Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, then later Woolf, Faulkner, all the poets I could find. I devoured them, sometimes until dawn, feeling a peculiar ache – a hunger satisfied and yet deepened. I remember once, after a particularly impassioned sermon on the evils of secular thought, coming home and immediately pulling out my copy of *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*. The hypocrisy was a bitter taste. It became a kind of dual citizenship. By day, I was the pillar of the community, dispensing advice on spiritual matters, leading prayers, comforting the afflicted. My voice, they said, was like a balm. By night, I was a silent rebel, exploring the depths of human experience, the vast, uncomfortable questions, the beauty of art that asked for no divine justification. The strain was constant, a low-grade tremor beneath the surface. I never spoke of it, not to my wife, not to my children. They would have been devastated, or worse, horrified. The stakes were too high, my position too entrenched. Now, at 79, the deception feels less like an active burden and more like a permanent fixture of my skeletal structure. The books are still there, in a locked cabinet behind the innocuous theological texts. My mind still gravitates towards the philosophical quandaries, the artistic expressions of human struggle, more than towards the familiar hymns. I wonder sometimes, idly, if anyone ever suspected. A flicker in my eye? A turn of phrase that didn't quite fit? I don't think so. I was too good at it. A lifetime of discipline, perhaps, honed by the military, by the necessity of survival in a different kind of war. And what did I survive for? To keep a secret, to maintain an illusion. The sadness isn't for what I missed, exactly, but for the profound loneliness of it all. To live a life so deeply divided, to never truly be known. It’s a quiet ache, a persistent phantom limb pain for a self that never fully materialized.