03-21-2026

The Race Down

I fell down half a mountain when I was nine. Maybe ten. I don’t remember most of it. Just the important parts.

It was a birthday hike. Yeah, a birthday hike. At the peak, someone said we should race back to camp for the candles. I didn’t hesitate. I never really did back then, especially around kids I wanted to like me. If the cool kid in the group says run, you run. So I ran.

But I couldn’t stop. I remember screaming it. I can’t stop. The other kids were shouting at me to roll. I remember things tumbling around me, and being terrified. I don’t know where the walking stick came from. Someone told me it ended up lodged under my bottom eyelid on the way down, upright, like a flag. I cried, scared. Then I passed out.

Everything after came in pieces.

I remember being carried on a wheelbarrow. Someone telling me everything was okay. Then nothing. Then a hospital ceiling. My dad crying. I knew my mom was holding my hand by the way she held it. I don’t remember any of the pain. It was all guilt.

I don’t remember being in the ICU, but I remember a classmate visiting. I heard them ask a nurse if it was really me. They said they couldn’t recognize me. I felt terrible about that. About making them feel that way. I was nine years old, my face destroyed, and I was worried about inconveniencing a classmate.

My mom was there every day, losing sleep. She had already carried harder things than most people carry in a lifetime, and here I was adding to it. I remember lying there and thinking about how she had told me not to go to that party. It was far. She wouldn’t be there to supervise but I begged to go.

The guilt didn’t arrive all at once. It built slowly, like a clogged drain.

In the months that followed, I was the most fragile kid I had ever seen. People told me how lucky I was not to have lost my eyes. I was grateful and apologetic at the same time. I didn’t understand it then, but that combination is its own kind of problem.

One person came to see me. André, from class. We used to draw superheroes together, filling pages with capes and muscles and fire auras. He drew me during the visit. He gave me a giant red eye. I still see that drawing.

My family treated me like glass. I didn’t go out much, and I told myself I was fine with that. It felt fair. My decisions had brought all of this on.

I’m older now, and the mountain is far away. But the guilt never really left. It just changed shape. I feel responsible for the people I love in a way I can’t always explain or control. I don’t like to see them cry. I would do more than is reasonable to avoid it.

I know where that comes from. There’s a kid at the bottom of all of it, bleeding and already apologizing.

What I haven’t been able to reach is the moment just before the fall. Not the accident. I can piece that together. I mean the feeling of running. Of being excited just to be included. Just to say yes. Just to belong to something, even if it was only for one afternoon on a mountain.

I think if I could remember that, I could be a little kinder to him.

The kid who only wanted to belong, and paid more than anyone should.