I was eighteen when the tree stood still,
and I was young enough to think
the world would always stay where I left it.
Metal screamed.
Glass became a thousand knives.
Then darkness.
Not the kind that comes at night.
Night still belongs to the sky.
This was different.
The world closed its eyes
and forgot to open them again.
Kentucky remained behind me,
all bluegrass memories,
red dirt roads,
summer heat rising from the pavement,
and the sound of a place
that had once been my whole universe.
I learned to see with my hands.
The edge of a table.
The face of a friend.
The trembling shape of a stranger’s kindness.
I learned that blindness
does not make the world disappear.
It just strips away the lies
we used to call seeing.
So I left Kentucky.
I followed no map.
Maps are funny things
when you cannot read them.
I followed voices.
Engines.
The smell of rain on hot ground.
The rhythm of a language
I did not yet understand.
And Mexico took me in.
Mexico did not ask
what I had lost.
It gave me sun.
It gave me music spilling through open doors,
the sharp scent of lime,
corn roasting somewhere nearby,
laughter breaking across a street
like light through a window.
I could not see the colors.
But I heard them.
I heard the red in the trumpets.
The gold in the voices.
The green in the mountains
when the wind moved through them.
People look at a blind man
and sometimes see a tragedy.
They see the tree.
They see the wreckage.
They see an eighteen year old boy
buried beneath the darkness.
But they are wrong.
I am not the boy who died that night.
I am what crawled out.
I am Kentucky in my bones
and Mexico in my blood.
I am the road after the wreck.
I am the hand reaching forward
into a world I cannot see
and refusing to turn back.
The tree took my eyes.
It did not take my life.
And every morning,
when the sun rises somewhere beyond my reach,
I face it anyway.
Because I have learned something
the sighted spend their whole lives avoiding.
You do not need to see the road
to keep walking.
You only need to decide
that the darkness
does not get the final word.
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