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. I remember the important parts. A birthday hike — yes, a birthday hike — and at the peak, someone said we should race back to camp for the candles. I didn't hesitate. I never hesitated back then, especially around kids I wanted to like me. If the cool kid in the group says run, you run. So I ran. At some point I couldn't stop. I remember screaming exactly that — I can't stop — and the other kids shouting at me to roll. I remember things rolling around me and being terrified. I don't know where the walking stick came from. Someone told me later it had lodged under my bottom eyelid on the way down, upright, like a flag. Then I cried, and then I passed out. What came after arrives in pieces. Being carried on a wheelbarrow, someone's voice telling me everything was okay. Then nothing. Then a hospital ceiling, and my dad crying. I knew my mom was holding my hand by the way she held it. My first feeling, waking up in that room, was not pain. It was guilt.

I don't remember being in the ICU, but I remember a classmate visiting. I heard them asking 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 the weight. I remembered, lying there, that she had told me not to go to that party. It was far. She wouldn't be there to supervise. I had gone anyway. The guilt didn't arrive all at once. It accumulated, the way water finds cracks.

The following months I was the most fragile kid I had ever seen. People told me how lucky I was not to have lost my eyes, and I agreed. I was grateful and apologetic in equal measure — a combination that, I now understand, is its own kind of problem. One real friend came to see me. We used to draw superheroes together, the two of us filling pages with capes and muscles and impossible jaws. He drew me during those months. 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 seemed only fair. My decisions had brought all of this on.

I am older now, and the mountain is far away. But the guilt never fully 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 a lot — more than is reasonable — to avoid it. I know where that comes from. I know 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 reconstruct that from fragments. I mean the feeling of running. Of being excited just to be included, just to say yes, just to belong to something 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 be part of the gang, and paid more than anyone should ever pay for it.