To my surprise, it was a place where my thoughts were the most lucid. I wasn’t bogged down in random trivial details or the luxury of time-consuming over-analysis. This place forced you to live because at any moment, life could be lost. Ramadi forced me to die unto myself.

I really can't stress this enough. If you want to make an impact, don't simply sit idly by and 'hope' for courage. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the decision made in determining what is more important than fear.

If anyone thinks interracial "anything" is a big deal, they're probably inbred.

Someone can tell you all your life that you’re inferior, but it doesn’t matter until you accept it and allow for validation. Once validation takes place, it’s then that the colonial malaise sets in like smallpox.

That’s what imperialism is all about, shoving your language, religion, culture, and race down others’ throats and telling them that they’re beneath you – and it’s not unique to the West either.

I have been cheated out of being treated like a human being. In my reflection I saw an empty vessel. They had cheated me and I was desperate to make the sharp pain in my head stop.

The open road. Seemingly my only friend for years upon end since leaving war. The road embraced me, let me breathe, and more importantly, did not judge me.

Indifference is the worst kind of response when love is expressed. Hate is not the antithesis of love; it’s the nonexistence of feeling, a pervasive apathy. When hate is present, so is love. It’s passion gone sour and fueled by pain, but, nonetheless, it’s passion and love is apparently still alive. Yet when indifference seeps into our spirits, an emotional numbness and permitted scotoma takes the place of any passion – whether it’s love or hate – and resigns in a new state of being.

Ramadi’s sky was generously filled with stars. Celestial ornaments set against a banner of a deep blue velvet sky. It was a place where hell, death, and heaven were so clear and the closest I’ve felt to all three in my life.

I wasn’t a person after all. I was simply this exotic thing for people to observe and investigate, an alien in any environment I was in.