Chapter 1

Getting Sick at Seventeen

When I was seventeen, I got sick with severe depression. Nothing could make me happy. I had always had a larger-than-life, extroverted personality. A great example of my confidence would be how I sung the national anthem before class every single day my senior year. I was a defensive back on the football team. Though other classmates were more popular than me, I still had a lot of friends.

In November 2006, my girlfriend at the time had just broken up with me. We will call her Rachel. The two of us had been dating for three months. I would spend the night at her house almost every weekend. My parents were unaware of our alone time because one of my best friends lived right next to her. Instead of going to his place like I told my mom and dad, I would stay at hers. We had an okay relationship. It was filled with many good times, but we were not the right fit. I was moping around daily at my parents’ house, licking my wounds. On a rough evening, after my ex had ended things, I had gone to a party at a friend’s home in our neighborhood in Chester, Arkansas, and hooked up with three different girls, beyond intoxicated for most of the gathering.

Chapter 11

Living in a Parking Lot

After leaving my apartment, I was officially homeless. Having little to no friends in the area, I had to stay in a retailer’s parking lot. The vendor allowed semitrucks to stay there, so it was my best option for residency. It was hot in July 2018. I would guess temperatures rose past one hundred degrees most days. Even though I was hot, tired, and lacked shower facilities, I still went to work every day. My isolation was taking a toll on my mental state. Would things ever turn around?

Chapter 1

The Hospital is Not Always a Safe Place

My life has been a whirlpool of disturbing and engulfing emotions. Now when I look back, it won’t be wrong to say that I have been battling depression for as long as I remember. Yes, I had moments where my life seemed to make perfect sense, but they were all short-lived.

At this point, everything seems so blurry. How can I distinguish between fact and fiction? I couldn’t make sense of what was real. Everything that was happening around me was fake or partially true, or entirely true? One morning, I was taken to a hospital for a brief time, and before I could know it, I had stayed at the hospital for days. During my stay at the hospital, I made acquaintances with an elderly patient who was also admitted there. We had our fair share of conversations; he taught me how to make huge amounts of money through the cryptocurrency market. He was probably the only good thing throughout my hospital experience. He became more of a character than a human. Was he my John from the Bible? Was I even an archangel?

Chapter 10

Time Travel

Life was nothing less than a fairytale, or perhaps, I was Alice in wonderland, stumbling upon one adventure after another. Perhaps my most interesting and unforgettable adventure was when I went time traveling. One moment, I was in a cell in block A, and the next moment I would find myself in a place my mind decided upon; it all happened in a flash. For some reason, my mind took me to the age of dinosaurs, the great Mesozoic era. There, I witnessed the majestic dinosaurs of many species; some of them were flying above me, some were walking amid the forests, and some crawled on the ground, and I was in awe.