Right now, life feels like chaos. It is not the kind of chaos where you can grab the pieces and start putting them together. It is the kind where the pieces are swirling in the air, and you are not even sure what the puzzle looks like anymore. Honestly, I have never felt quite like this before, and it is terrifying in a way I cannot fully explain. I do not know where my life is heading, and the uncertainty gnaws at me every single day.

For a moment, just a brief, fleeting moment, I felt like I had found something solid. I was in the most intense relationship of my life, one that pushed me out of everything I had ever known and planted me in Phoenix, Arizona. For a handful of months, I got to experience what I imagine most people would call a normal life. I was not in the trenches anymore. No gang life, no chaos, just a family. I had a wife, two step-sons, soccer practices and games, dinners together, shared laughs. For the first time, I felt like I had stepped into a world I did not know existed for me, like I could breathe in a way I never had before.

But then it all fell apart. My wife and I split, and the life I had started to build crumbled around me. It is hard to explain just how much that has broken me. To feel like you have been given a glimpse of something beautiful, only for it to be taken away, feels cruel. She was my best friend, the person I leaned on, and for a little while, my everything. Now, all of that is gone.

And here I am, lost again. Drowning, honestly. I do not know where to go or what to do next. Every step feels like walking blindfolded on the edge of a cliff. What is the right choice? What is the best choice? It is like every option I consider leads me back to the same question: Am I going to end up back where I started?

I just got off probation after spending 14 years locked in the system, either in prison or under supervision. Fourteen years of my life, gone. That is half my life. And now, here I am, staring at the possibility that I might go back down that same path. If I go back to Florida, I know what is waiting for me there. Prison or worse. But staying here, drifting without a plan, feels impossible too.

The truth is, I do not know what to do. I do not have the answers. And that terrifies me. I just wish I could figure out what the next step is, what is right, what is going to save me from falling back into the old patterns that nearly destroyed me before. Because right now, I feel like I am slipping, and it sucks. It sucks so bad.

I guess writing this is my way of trying to make sense of it all, even if I cannot find any answers yet. Maybe putting it out there will help me see something I cannot right now. Or maybe someone else who has been here will read this and know they are not alone. Either way, all I can do is take it one moment at a time and hope that somehow, someway, I will find my way.

Until then, I am just here, trying to keep my head above water.