I’m sixty-two years old and I think I’ve spent most of my life pretending to be a version of myself that everyone else can live with. It’s 2am and the house is so quiet it feels like it’s pressing against my ears. I’m a professor of literature, supposedly an expert on the human condition, but the truth is I don’t understand my own life at all. I spent twenty-two years in the Army before I ever stood in front of a classroom, and I think that transition did something to me that I never quite fixed. I’m used to the discipline, the rank, the way you’re supposed to carry yourself so that nobody sees the cracks. But lately, the cracks are all I can see. Every Sunday morning, I tell my daughter I’m going to the university library to get ahead on my grading or to finish my research paper on Post-War Poetics. It’s a lie I tell with a straight face, the same way I used to report to my CO. Instead, I drive forty minutes out to this little hole-in-the-wall place called The Rusty Mug. It’s a grease trap that smells like burnt coffee and old upholstery, and it’s perfect because nobody there knows who I am. They don’t see a department head or a former officer. They just see a tired old man in a flannel shirt. I sit in the back corner booth—the one with the duct tape over the tear in the vinyl—and I pull out the latest issue of *The Paris Review* or some other high-brow literary journal. I lay it out on the table like a shield. But tucked inside those thick, ivory pages is always a copy of a celebrity tabloid. Some trashy rag full of "Who Wore It Better" and fake news about some pop star’s divorce. I spend two hours reading that garbage cover to cover while the people around me think I’m "engaging with the canon." It’s pathetic. I know it is. I have a Ph.D. and a Bronze Star, and here I am, obsessed with whether some twenty-year-old actor is dating his co-star. But I can’t stop. When I’m reading those stories, my brain finally goes quiet. For forty years, I’ve had to be serious. I’ve had to lead men through things I still can’t talk about, and then I had to come home and be the intellectual authority for kids who think a bad grade is the end of the world. My life has been so heavy for so long. The tabloids are... they’re light. They’re nothing. They don’t require honor or courage or deep thought. They’re just colorful noise that drowns out the sound of the desert and the sound of my wife leaving because I was "too cold." Last Sunday, one of my former students actually walked into the café. I saw him coming and I nearly had a heart attack. I felt my heart racing the same way it did when we were under fire in '91. I slammed the journal shut and stared at the ceiling until he passed. He didn't see me, but I sat there shaking for ten minutes afterward. I realized then how much of my identity is built on this lie of being "refined." If they saw what I was actually looking at, the whole facade would crumble. They’d see I’m just as empty as the magazines I’m reading. I feel like a fraud every time I stand at that lectern on Monday morning. I talk about the "moral complexity of the modern novel" while I’m still thinking about some reality star’s plastic surgery. It’s like I’m living two lives, and the one that’s supposed to be the real one—the professor, the veteran—feels like a costume I can’t take off. The man in the café, the one who likes the trashy stories and the cheap coffee, that’s the one who’s actually alive. But he’s a secret. He has to be. I’m supposed to retire in eighteen months. Everyone expects me to write my memoirs, or at least a definitive book on war literature. The thought of it makes me want to be sick. I don't want to write about the things that actually happened. I don't want to think about the "legacy" they keep talking about at department meetings. Legacy is just another word for the weight you leave on other people’s shoulders. I just want to be done with the weight. I’m sitting here now, looking at my leather satchel on the chair, and I know exactly what’s inside it. A journal that costs thirty dollars and a magazine that costs five. I’m a grown man and I’m hiding my true self behind a wall of academic jargon and old medals. I don't think I’m ever going to tell anyone. I’ll probably die in that booth one Sunday, and they’ll find the tabloid inside the journal and finally understand that the man they respected was just a tired old soldier looking for a way to stop thinking. I just want to stop being "The Colonel." I just want to be someone who doesn't have to care about anything important for once... even if it's just for an hour on a Sunday.