I wasn’t the kind of person who could bounce back easily from a heavy loss. I may have had the resilience to return alive from the Sandia Mountains when not everyone else was fortunate enough to do so, but that staying power I had was not only my greatest strength, it was also my greatest weakness, as is often the case. When I sank low, I would stay there, feeling all of the emotions that came with the territory: shame, despair, hopelessness, depression, and anxiety about the future.

Emotionally speaking, there was no halfway point for me. I went everywhere around the circle except for the middle, which I considered dull and lukewarm. I felt like in order to feel alive, emotional extremism was the way, and that meant navigating through the highest highs and the lowest lows, which has impact but lacks emotional stability. I didn’t personally know the kind of balance that came with avoiding emotional extremism, nor did I see the value in it, but it’s possible that was precisely what I needed in order to take control of my life and keep from sliding from one extreme to the other wildly. If only I could learn about this theoretical state of balance somewhere I might learn to appreciate it, but there was no system in place that I was aware of that offered such an educational experience.

Sometimes life has a way of redirecting us to where we need to go dependent upon our needs without our awareness. Could getting fired from Sara Lee be one of such redirections? I wasn’t sure, but at the moment I felt cursed. The path was not clear to me. I didn’t want to go back to Allegiance Staffing because I figured I’d just repeat the same pattern over again. To avoid doing that, I started looking all over the city for places that were hiring. There was always some reason that prevented me from getting hired, however.

One example was when I applied to work at Goodwill. At my interview, the manager asked me what was my greatest weakness at my previous jobs, and I was honest and told him that sometimes I would arrive a few minutes late. According to his response, that was exactly the thing they didn’t want there, and I lacked the willingness to be adaptive to the situation and assure him it wouldn’t be a problem. I was too set in my ways, and the reason I didn’t get hired this time may have been myself.

Just as before, the radio often seemed to reflect my inner and outer circumstances. The song “Ghetto” by Akon and remixed with Tupac and Biggie would often play as I set out looking for a way to survive. The song had a melancholic tone, and the fact that it was cold outside and I had nobody made it even harder. I was reaching levels of desperation I had never reached before. I saw a Navy recruitment office in the city on Menaul Blvd. and began to think it might be the only option I had left.

After walking in through the front door, I was greeted by Navy recruiters Martinez and Coronado. I explained that I was interested in learning more about recruitment and they had no problem explaining the process to me. After learning about my previous experience as a cook, Martinez suggested I become a Navy cook. It sounded somewhat appealing to me, getting to travel around the world cooking meals for my comrades. They told me I could go through all of the prerequisites and then drop out at the last moment if I changed my mind.

I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I agreed to go through all of the exams. Martinez was very friendly and invited me to his home for dinner near the end of the process. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to soften me up or if he was genuinely this kind, but I enjoyed myself. We ate grilled steaks and watched the UFC. Somewhere in the back of my mind I did have thoughts about what I was getting into. Everything was alright on the surface, but there was an underlying tone of the serious commitment it would take to go through with this, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready.

I spoke to my father back home about it. He called me one day to talk about it from where he worked, The Madison Times. He wasn’t fully opposed to my decision but expressed concern about it. In the background I could hear someone he worked with who I had met previously when I lived in Madison and delivered for the Madison Times. Her name was Heidi Vargas, and something I heard her say cut deep.

“This isn’t the way your life was meant to go,” she said.

I didn’t know her very well, but the fact that it came from her when she didn’t have nearly as much investment in me as others did made it more impactful, like she didn’t fully understand what she was saying but something greater than herself was speaking through her. That was enough to make me completely reconsider what I was doing.

The next time I saw recruitment officers Martinez and Coronado, I told them I was going to back out of becoming a Navy recruit. They seemed to take it well and told me they’d still be there if I changed my mind back. Now the question was, where was I really going from here?

The last thing I wanted to do was go back to Allegiance Staffing, but I decided it’s better to work than not to, regardless of the circumstances. The next place they sent me to couldn’t have been much more challenging than it was. They sent me to a facility that produces drywall. One of their furnaces needed heavy maintenance work, and temp. workers like myself made the perfect victims for the job. The furnace was a cylindrical piece of machinery that required climbing up a ladder to get to the entrance. Inside of the furnace was very claustrophobic, and there was dust and fiberglass everywhere, so it was necessary to wear masks, goggles, and gloves inside as we pried insulation bricks off of the sides while crawling around in a tight space.

The foreman instructed us step by step, but left the real work to myself and my two partners. One was a man named Philander who was a Crow Indian from Montana. The other man’s name escapes my memory, but what I noticed was how big his eyes looked the entire time, like the job was too much for him. We were told it would be a two-day job, and I didn’t see him coming back the second day. That instinct was correct, because on the second day, it was only Philander and I who showed up to work. During our shift, they requested a third worker who showed up at least an hour after the grueling shift had begun. After about 30 minutes I stopped seeing him, and I asked Philander if he had seen the new guy, even though both of us were still new guys also. Philander told me he took off, and laughed because he said the guy was bigger than we were and was surprised he wasn’t strong enough to handle it.

During our breaks in the cafeteria, Philander and I would talk and tell each other stories. We were probably the dustiest people on earth at the time. He remarked that I looked like a Cherokee warrior as though I had painted my face for battle with all the dust on my face, since I mentioned which tribe I was loosely a part of after mentioning he was part of the Crow tribe. He said he spent most of his time living between New Mexico and Montana. He would switch from one state to the other when he got bored. The most significant thing he told me was that one night he and his cousin were in a parking lot in his cousin’s dually.

Out of nowhere, two rival gangs clashed in the parking lot in front of them with guns and other weapons. His cousin didn’t hesitate to protect their safety and drove straight through the crowd quickly. Philander said he felt something like going over a speed bump a couple of times. I could only guess it was a couple of the gangsters, and the fact that they were in a dually meant that whoever it was probably wasn’t getting back up after that. I understood the need for them to get out in a hurry, and it’s possible they were parked in such a way that they had little choice but to do what they did, but it was still shocking.

Philander and I both persisted with the job until it was complete, celebrating at the end by giving each other a high five. It was Hell for those two days, but one thing was clear; I was starting to get my momentum back again. I had to continue looking for a way out of the bottomless pit I had fallen into.

If “The Warzone,” the area where I lived, was as bad as they say it used to be, that means probably a good number of people had been killed there violently. Some people say that angry spirits of the dead continue to roam the land long after physical death, looking for revenge. There is no concrete way to prove or disprove that, but it makes sense from a certain point of view. Assuming death is just a transitory stage, a heavy emotional burden might be enough to keep a soul anchored to where they are until they find some kind of resolution. I know what I’ve seen, but not everyone has had the same experience.

One night as I slept in my apartment, I suddenly woke up and realized I was lying on my stomach. It was still dark, probably very early in the morning. It wasn’t much time at all since I woke up that I felt what felt like two hands touch my back for an instant and either withdraw or fade to nothing. Not wanting to appear startled, I slowly turned over onto my back and saw nothing but a dark room. The sensation was so clear to me that I couldn’t possibly believe my senses were fooling me. I slept very uneasily for the rest of the night and didn’t experience any other phenomena.

The next day I decided to send a message to my mother. Years earlier my mother took me to someone who she regularly spoke with during some of my most troubling times. Her name was Kathleen, and she claimed to be a psychic. I decided to give her a try because my mother believed in her enough to say that she thought she could help me, and that was a lot coming from my mother. My mother was an extremely grounded person who was critical of anything that was less than perfect, a trait I inherited to some level and had to learn to evolve beyond the need for self-criticism. It’s hard to believe someone as pragmatic as my mother would go to see a psychic on a regular basis.