Money lived as a knot that never fully untied. I sold plasma twice a month when the gas bill came with its ugly red stamp. I learned the difference between a handout and a hand up from a caseworker who knew the difference, too. I stretched a rotisserie chicken across three dinners and learned to sew buttons with dental floss. Exhaustion became a kind of weather system—days when I’d read the same sentence three times and still couldn’t tell you what it said.

Church was complicated. My father’s church wasn’t mine anymore. On Sundays, I found a storefront congregation between a laundromat and a payday-loan place—folding chairs, a battered guitar, no smoke, no mirrors. They didn’t ask me for a testimony; they didn’t ask me for an apology. A woman named Ruth with silver hair rolled tight started showing up with casseroles “just because,” which is a holiness all its own. On nights I almost dialed my mother and didn’t, I baked cornbread for Ruth and said thank you too many times.

In uniform for the first time, I stood in a campus bathroom under awful lighting and didn’t recognize myself. Chin level. Shoulders back. The instructors weren’t sentimental. They kept checklists and standards and five-minutes-early as a religion, and I started craving that certainty. Do the work, earn the rank. Nobody could steal what you earned.