Lost bets

When I left the Army and went back to college, I wondered if I was going to be able to adjust at all. Thing is, this wasn’t my first time having to relearn the basics all over again. The ways to act, the slight actions that can label you as either in or out, all matter.

I’ve been around the world, lived in a few places. Dodoma, Dehli, Lansing, Denali. Lots of lost bets, I suppose. But this time it was different, in the sense that I’d be returning to something that I , ostensibly, knew. Each time before, from country to country, continent to continent, had been to something new and unknown.

This was something different. I was going back to the society I had fought for. A silly thought, then, especially when the likes of Trump laid bare just how unwelcome my ilk can be. But I did think in Roman terms. A kind of blood tax for me to solidify my roots. Lost bets, right?

But having been on the edge of empire, I, a man of many cultures, or none, depending on whom you speak to, had lost the ability to think. About my place in the world or its place in my heart. A kind of angry nihilism had settled inside me and I could only do what I had done before, what had allowed me to survive: observe.

And what I saw, in the halls of the university I was attending, in the public discourse, was much the same as I had left it. At least about America and what was worth fighting for. I don’t mean just wars.

One thing, however, was different, and that was a kind of background malaise that no one seemed to…