Facing Phoenix.

    Life, as I knew it, was over. Everything that I worked towards, sacrificed for, dreamed about and loved every waking second of was erased in matter of hours. My flight from Phoenix, Arizona to Albany, New York was the moment I never wanted to happen. I was coming back home; with no money, no job, no car, no prospects at all and a failed engagement to the girl I was in love with. Not many thoughts ran through my mind during the flight. I watched the clouds and wide open sky that was almost as empty as I was feeling inside. I was coming back to the place I gave everything I had to leave, and I was coming back to nothing. Life in Phoenix -besides my fantasy life of being a rock star- was everything that I ever wanted. Palm trees everywhere, beautiful weather all the time, a small family I loved to death, a job I actually wanted to excel at and I life that truly felt like my own. I would smoke cigarettes on my balcony at night, watching the stars and thanking every one of them, every single night, for where I was in life. I was truly happy.
    It felt like a bad dream I couldn't wake up from my first night back in New York. Not only did I have to move back into my mother's house, but I even got demoted to the smallest room there. Life had cruel humor. I didn't anticipate being there for long, though. It was the first week of May, and my mom was moving at the end of the month from Saratoga to Clifton Park. There was no way hell I was going to live in Clifton Park. I'd rather kill myself before letting the boredom of suburbia do it for me. I had three weeks to piece together a life for myself.
    The first week back, I fell into my old life with my friends again; drinking, smoking and shenanigans throughout the nights of the week. As unstable as some of our actions were, it felt good to have some sort of security in life. It wasn't as fun whenever Phoenix was brought up, though. People had a way of looking right through me with sympathetic stares, like I was a victim of some horrible tragedy. Every time I was asked how I was doing or what exactly happened, the grips of Phoenix latched onto me and tried to drag me down with everything it had. The words cut right through any moment that was going on. It was uncomfortable. I obviously had to acknowledge that something happened, but the last thing I wanted to be was a sob story. I had gone through hell, and now I was back. But I had a life I needed to get in order.
    I managed to find a job at a small tobacco shop/hookah bar right in town within a week. It was close enough to walk to if I ended up getting an apartment, since I no longer had a car (I sold it to fund my trip back to New York). Plane tickets weren't cheap and neither was the cost of shipping all my belongings back. All I had was a suitcase full of clothes, everything else was somewhere across the country. I missed my guitar. I had more emotions than I knew what to do with building inside of me, and I had nothing to sing my sorrows with. I had to let them out somehow. What I was feeling was too powerful for the simplicity of songs. I grabbed a pen, a notebook and let myself bleed.
    The power of words was something that I had felt before, in songs and inspirational quotes. But nothing compared to what I felt that night. A piece of myself was left in every letter of every word. It took me places I couldn't see. helped me become things I could never be and filled me with feelings I couldn't get anywhere else. It was an escape for me. It became a hobby that quickly turned into an obsession over the next few weeks. I would bring a notepad to work and write down any and every idea that came to mind. I started devouring books, looking at how others created world's of their own. Not much else ran through my mind those first few weeks. Unfortunately, life was changing, once again.
    My mom was moving in a week, and I still had no leads on an apartment or place to stay. I made a few calls from postings I saw, but everything was too expensive for my budget. I could feel the cold, clammy hands of defeat reaching out and offering me unwanted guidance. I was desperate. I was scratching and clawing at anything that would help me from slipping further down in life. Call, after call, after call. I was greeted with rejection every time. It was hard to find stability in anything when everything was in constant flux. Once again, I turned to writing. It was there, it was immediate, it was stable. My packages with all my belongings had finally been delivered after two and a half weeks, but I didn't even bother to open the boxes. I didn't see a point to it when I would be packing them up again in a few days to move to Clifton Park.
    There's a few points in your life where you feel like you can't sink any lower and have hit rock bottom. The day I moved to Clifton Park with my mom was worse. I felt like I was under the rocks. I remember laying in my bed, staring at the ceiling and painting all my feelings of failure across the blank, white canvas. Two months before, I couldn't have been living a more contradictory life. I had a place of my own, a good job, a car, a five-year-old who adopted me as her new father and a loving fiance. Two months later, I was more co-dependent on help than I had been in ten years. It wasn't completely her fault, but I couldn't help but hating my ex-fiance in that moment. If only we had tried a different way to fix something, phrased a thought better or waited a little longer before making the split final maybe, just maybe, my whole life would be different. But that life was over. I had failed.
    My setbacks weren't only affecting me. It was starting to rub off on my family. Needing to borrow a car everyday for work. It was an inconvenience to them, and truthfully, I was growing tired of the job. It felt bad enough to be in my shoes, but I didn't want to make my family wear them too. I worked the job until the end of summer, and after no more living options in Saratoga popped up, I quit. I figured if I was going down, I might as well sink the whole ship. Once again, I had nothing of my own. I was starting over, learning to crawl.
    Life couldn't have felt more symbolic to me than at that time. The apartment complex I was living in was one street away from the apartment complex that I lived in for my first few years of life. Everything was starting over for me. The name of the neighborhood across the street had the same name as my ex's old neighborhood that I would drive to in earlier years to pick her up for dates before I moved out Phoenix. It was almost as if it was taunting me, showing me everything I had lost and failed to measure up to. I had a long way to go before I could feel like I had surpassed my old life.
    The pulse of Clifton Park was about as exciting as a rock. I spent my days writing and putting out some job applications without any real desire to be hired by any of the businesses. I could feel my skill level slowly developing more and more every time I wrote, but my resources for learning were limited. There was no bookstore in Clifton Park, and I had already exhausted all of the books I owned. I had a list of writers I wanted to read and nowhere to find them. I was bored stiff one particular day, so I decided to check out the library. It would prove to be another magic moment in a life that felt nothing more than deflated.
    I certainly felt out of place at the library. It full of mostly elderly women and children. Then I walked through the sliding doors; cigarette soaked fingers, tattered jeans,messy hair, worn down shoes and the desire to learn as much as I could. I was blown away. I was not only finding books the stores in Saratoga didn't have, but I even had a choice of who I wanted to read. Sherwood Anderson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain,  Thomas Wolfe, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Miller, William Faulkner. They were all there and they all had something to teach me. I would check out three books at a time and finish them within a week or two, then repeat the cycle. I would carefully read every line of every page. What where they doing, how were they doing it, what wasn't I doing and what could I do to be better than them? All these thoughts encouraged my appetite for improvement. I learned from the best and I learned from the worst.
    From early on, I felt like I could and would do better than everyone else I read. I may not have had the skills do it, but I damn sure had the drive. I started reviewing my own stories and poems, critiquing them harshly, keeping notes and improving every week. I got into a flow where it took over everything. I would wake up smiling, ready to write everyday. I had trouble sleeping at night because of all the ideas running through my mind. I would get up constantly and write them down. Even when I was sleeping, I never rested from the work. But most of all, it gave me purpose in life again.
    As much as I was loving the writer's life, real life was knocking on the door of the rock I was living under. It had been months since I had a real job. It was getting tiresome never having any money. I applied to over thirty jobs, and the none of them called me back. Was Clifton Park really that small that I wore out all my options? I couldn't believe it. I wasn't aiming high either. I resorted to applying to dish washing, register, fast food jobs and every minimum wage job in between. I had high hopes for a low heaven. Although I would continue applying to jobs weekly, I took it as sign. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't ideal, hell, it wasn't even ever guaranteed to ever happen, but writing was my life's work. Even though my living situation suggested otherwise, I felt like I had something special to offer the world. It's not something you can convince to non-believers, it's nothing the mediocre lives of society can fathom, it's not even reasonable when you write it down, but self-belief is the most powerful feeling there is. I just knew I was going to make it happen. I simply couldn't see a world where I went a whole lifetime letting it slip by. However tough the times got, however many rejections I faced, however many doubts people had in me, I believed. I was the greatest writer in the world, and I had to carve out my own journey to reach my goals. Clifton Park was the starting point, but my end destination was nowhere in sight. But I always felt close to it when I closed my eyes.
    Even though my confidence moving forward was too high to be touched, I ended up getting a job. I worked part-time a few days out of the week for my aunt's process serving company. It was by no means a career, but it was at least money to buy beer with. While drinking those beers on the back patio one night, I saw the neighbor of the apartment next door doing the same. We had a casual conversation that would turn into a whole night of drinking together. We would develop a relationship of sorts after awhile. She was beautiful, and extremely intelligent. We were on pretty similar life paths as well. She was living with her sister and her sisters boyfriend, after she had just gotten out of a bad relationship. She was confident in her future aspirations. She was a waitress who was taking courses at night to become a certified nurse. She was doing everything she could to make it happen She understood my point of view on writing and even encouraged it. We were kindred spirits on the same path of separate journeys. We grew close as people could be, finding solace in each others struggles. We both knew we were only a stop along the way for the other, but timing couldn't have been better. We were the reaffirmation that each of our goals needed.
    Not only was my confidence in my writing growing, but the feeling started to spill out into other areas of my life. I had a swagger that couldn't be stopped. It came out in the way I spoke, what I said and how I presented myself. Certainty was felt in everything I did. People have a way of attaching themselves to a feeling when it's in front of them, and I could feel my confidence giving hope to anyone I talked to. Nothing felt too far out of reach. I visualized the life I wanted for myself everyday; a house in California overlooking the ocean, with waves peacefully hissing onto the shore while palm trees danced in the soft breeze. I saw myself in interviews, explaining the thoughts behind all of my great work. I saw myself making cultural impacts anytime I released a piece of writing. I saw all of this happening if I put the work in. I had the life I wanted all planned out. All I needed to do was take the steps. And the first step was the hardest. 
    I needed a life of my own again, out of the dull clutches of Clifton Park. I wanted to be back in Saratoga; with my friends, my own space and a job. I didn't care how hard I needed to work to make it happen, it was going to happen. I saw of life of hard work and sacrifice for a greater cause, and it was all worth it. Almost a year later, and I was just about in the exact same position, scratching and clawing to make anything work. My friend ended up being able to get me a job at his restaurant. It felt alien to have somewhere to be everyday after not working a steady job for so long, but I was unstoppable. I saw it as the first piece of building my life. It was proof that if you wanted something bad enough, work hard and it'll come to you. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect.
    The job, just like the first one I ever had, was washing dishes. It wasn't what I wanted, but it was something. It didn't take long for me to hate it, two hours in fact. Between driving to Saratoga and back, the late hours and exhaustion afterwords, I had no time or motivation for writing. Not only that, but the job itself was crushing my confidence. There was no way for me to feel empowered when I was the bottom b***h of the kitchen. There was a silver lining in it all, though. One of my old roommates, who I lived with before I moved to Phoenix, worked there. And he told me there was a room opening up in the house at the end of the month. The beginning of the life I wanted was within reach. I just needed something to elevate me a bit more to touch it all. I decided to free myself from some of the unnecessary weight that was holding me down. I called up my old job I had before I left for Phoenix, and they were hiring. I walked in on my day off from the restaurant, told them to give me old position back and they did. The slightest detail in life had changed my whole mentality. I had set hours, a job I wasn't embarrassed about, time to write, and most importantly, I had everything in place to start my new life.
    My new life was exactly like my life before Phoenix, except I was different inside. My first time under the same circumstances, I just kind of stumbled into it. It was never a direction I desired to go in. But this time, I knew exactly what I wanted. It felt incredible to lose everything, be able to gain it back and be on the path to a much larger goal. I worked my first week at my old job while moving my belonging's into my new room after shifts. I even got a bigger room in the apartment this time around. Things were looking up for me. While I was cleaning out the room form the previous tenant, I felt a rush of life surge through every cell in my body. Someone had left a California license plate above the highest window in the room. For them, it might have just been a cool looking decoration. But for me, it was the universe giving me another sign. It knew where I wanted to end up in life, and it was giving me small pieces of that vision. It was up to me to look for the rest of the scene.
    I did it. I felt like I had finally gotten out of the shadow that Phoenix had cast over me. I was no longer a victim, but a survivor. I was reborn out of the ashes of my old life. I had an accomplishment that was bigger than Phoenix. I felt it when I was biking home from work at night; the street lights racing by in yellow blurs, their reflection gleaming across puddles of dying rain and the feeling that I could do anything I wanted to next. The world was mine. It wasn't the greatest circumstances, but it was all mine. If I had built a life from nothing, then there was no telling where I could go after I proved to myself I had the capabilities to make anything I want happen.
    As you're reading this now, the universe is still giving me signs. Exactly one year from the date I came back from Phoenix, is the date I'm finishing this writing. I'm awestruck at how much you can change for yourself. You can live many lives in the span of one lifetime. Never settle and never give up. The world will get out of your way if you desire something bad enough. Be sure to appreciate everything along the way; the good, the bad, the rock bottoms. Because they all can teach you something. Even now, as I just came back inside from smoking a cigarette on the back deck, I'm truly happy. I looked to the sky and thanked every star for where I am in life. With every letter of every word taking me closer to my dream.