One of the times I put myself in counseling over my general ill fit in this world I had an epiphany that I will not repeat here, words coming out of my own mouth that rotated my world to a new axial tilt. I spent the rest of the day aglow, everything seemed saturated with meaning (but with no LSD). I went and had lunch at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant and read an English language Vietnamese paper that included a poem whose penultimate line was

Vietnam is not a war.

On most other days I might have just gone "huh," but on this day it shot right through me. Now I live here.