They say hell is the day on which the person you became, meets the person you could have become. I think they about got it right.

My parents divorced when I was three months old, and my clone was given to my father. When I was old enough to understand what that meant, I began to daydream about my sister. I thought of meeting her, and being the best of friends, inseparable, and unbeatable. It'd be us against the world.

Of course, I dreamed that when momma began to drink. It was tough, but I'm a quitter. I supported her, loved her, and did the best I could. When that wasn't good enough still, I moved out the day I was legally old enough. By then, I'd enough common sense to know I had to scratch out a life for myself in this world. I dropped out of school, got a job as a dishwasher, scraped my pennies together for nice clothes like I seen the managers wear, and started taking interviews anywhere I could get them, didn't matter much where or for what.

Only problem was, I didn't know anything. Every time I failed, I learned a little more, though. I learned about the importance of having a phone. No one can call you back if you don't have a phone. I learned how important it was to have an email. With a little help from my momma's neighbors, I found a library that had free internet so I could get an email address. Then I felt all official-like.

I had this dream of being a respectable business lady. I was absolutely certain, that if someone would just give me a chance, I'd prove myself. I was a hard worker, I knew I was. I'd stay late and get there early. I'd look at it the way no one else would. I'd be happy, and always go the extra mile.

And I learned that couch surfing couldn't last forever. I had enough saved for a down payment on a tiny flat I was sharing with three other kids I found through some website called "Craigslist".

My opportunity finally came, after four years of washing dishes, in the form of a data entry job that paid barely more than the minimum wage of the boiling dish water. But I was so excited. I'd never been so excited in my whole life.

Though that didn't make my reality any easier. I was so broke that winter, that on cold nights I slept at the office because I couldn't afford the heat in my tiny apartment. I washed all my clothes by hand in the sink (sometimes at work after hours) because they lasted longer that way, and because I didn't have a way to get to a laundromat.

I ate beans and rice, mostly. I never drank anything but water, because everything to drink costs money. Whenever there was some sort of party in the office with food, I volunteered to take the leftovers to a soup kitchen. Of course, the only kitchen they ended up in was mine. And I knew that was dishonest and bad, but it was survival. I still feel bad about that.

My apartment was really empty. I had a little air mattress, and nothing else. I did get some bowls and plates from a thrift shop, though. In the end, it was cheaper than paper plates. My roomies were real glad to get proper plates.

I lived on a dime and a prayer.

But I guess I didn't pray hard enough. All those prayers had lined up like dominoes, so that when one fell, they all fell. My roomies fell through on their portion of rent, and I couldn't pay their part. There was a late fee, and I couldn't pay that either. After a few more months, we got evicted.

I put my clothes into plastic bags from Wal-Mart. I put them in my cubicle, hidden under stacks of paper hoping no one would notice. But they did. I was written up. They said that was strike one.

And then they caught me sleeping in my cubicle. It was an automatic termination. That means I lost my job.

I grabbed my bags and that was that. I was homeless. Being that it was still winter, I spent a lot of my time pretending to shop in stores where it was warm. One of my favorite stores to get lost in, was Best Buy. It was big enough that most of the people there didn't notice.

It was there, on one of those big flat-screen, plasma TV's, that I met my sister. She was the CEO of the company that had fired me. And the news person was talking about how she been named something with a top 500 fortune cookie company. He said her wedding, that was planned for this coming weekend cost more than 3 million dollars.