I'm sweeping the floor, sandy and dusty from the five trips to the beach over the last four days. I pause, and stare at the grains against the tile, getting lost in the browns. I look up again, and I'm not in my kitchen anymore. I'm thousands of miles away, on the other side of the world. Instead of a broom, I'm holding a M16A2 semi-automatic rifle, locked and loaded with a magazine, finger resting just behind the trigger, my thumb resting just below the safety.

We're stopping for lunch fifteen kilometers south of Al Basarah. I'm opening my rations, and sitting on the desert floors as artillery sings its violent melody a few miles ahead of us. I open my vegetarian rice pouch and the silence is shattered by a thunder crack of a 55 millimeter cannon. The ground around me shakes, yet somehow it feels peaceful.

Instead of a t-shirt, I'm wearing a flak jacket. Instead of jeans and flats, I'm in camo pants. Tan combat boots. Instead of the cute cowgirl hat that Logan gave me on my nineteenth birthday, I'm in a Kevlar helmet. The weight from the ruck sack presses on my shoulders and deep into the small of my back. Underneath it, a pool of sweat slowly spreads into the clothing, because its only march but its already cresting one hundred.

To my right is the vastness of the Persian Gulf. The clear blue waters stretch to the horizon, and I picture getting in and swimming there, wherever there is, because the waters cold and just over the horizon, behind all of that blue there might just be a heaven. I take a mouthful of rice and look to my left and there is nothing. Brown sand stretches to another horizon, perhaps towards hell, and the gray haze and smoke from the oilfields burning place their acrid taste deep within every mouthful.

The right is where I want to go. To the south, towards some kind of paradise, even though I would drown getting there, my body merely a floating buffet bar for sharks and other forms of sea life. And such is the price of heaven.

The left is where we are going, as soon as we finish waging fire and brimstone on this city. It won't be long before the big guns do their work, leaving rusted out hulls and dead bodies of what used to be the 3rd Armored Division of the Iraqi forces. To the left is smoke and fire, death and bloodshed and starving families. Children missing limbs. Adults with simple reminders of a missing eye, or a missing hand that it wasn't so long ago when we were here before. And such is the price of hell.

Sergeant First Class Duttweiler, he tells everyone that we're moving out in ten minutes and I'm looking towards the ocean. He yells this, but he seems far away and distant, like a character in a movie, but I still leave my ear plugs in because the guns are firing and its loud. Mini earthquakes and lightning and Jesus in all his glory loud. On my right shoulder, a dusty American Flag is sewn, the field of blue facing forward, always forward.

And people wonder why such a simple task as sweeping can seem impossible.

These aren’t my memories. Part of me knows this, tries to remind me by flashing behind my closed eyelids a series of random snapshot images of my childhood. But even the deepest parts of my own self isn’t entirely convinced of my history. What starts as firm moments in time—picnics in the park, teddy bears and stories at bedtime—soon becomes a jumbled mess of recollections that aren’t my own, becoming too infused and complicated to pick through.

You see, I will never be just a twenty-two year old girl. Marie? She is simply a memory of another person, another lifetime that doesn’t feel like my own. I am Rogue. A concoction of the amorphous bits of a person that makes them who they are. I am their pain (concentration camps, experimentation labs, burning Iraqi night skies) and their joy (first loves, weddings, the birth of a child) and everything in between. I am a living catalog of the best and worst parts of humanity. I am the collective existences of many.

I am not me.

We are us.

My roommate, Jubes, she just came in from outside, carrying in the last of the summer gear that needs to be packed up before heading back to the mansion. She's just looking at me, wondering where I went and what I was doing there. I smile at her and drag the broom across the kitchen desert, cleaning that land once and for all of filth, dirt and grime. I smile at her and tell her that I was just thinking about the ocean. I smile at her and tell her with my eyes the things I can never say with my mouth, and she thinks she understands, because she carries an extra gene as well, and she puts her hand on my shoulder and vanishes into the bedroom without a flak jacket, without a Kevlar, and with no weapons to speak of.