At eighteen,
I met a tree.
It had no name.
No warning.
No reason to remember me.
But I remember it.
The sound of metal
meeting something older than my blood.
The glass.
The screaming.
The silence afterward.
Then darkness.
People say I went blind.
That is the simple version.
The truth is,
I lost the world
I thought I knew.
Kentucky became a memory
made of sounds.
The wind through fields.
Rain on a roof.
A truck passing down a country road.
The distant bark of a dog
somewhere beyond the fence.
I could not see the hills anymore.
But I knew where they were.
That was the strange thing.
The world did not vanish.
It simply stopped explaining itself
with pictures.
For years,
I lived inside the wreckage.
Not the car.
Me.
Then I got tired
of being a monument
to one terrible night.
So I left Kentucky.
I went south.
I went to Mexico
because sometimes a man needs
to walk far enough away
that his past gets tired
of chasing him.
Mexico was loud.
Beautifully loud.
Music.
Markets.
Voices.
Motorcycles.
Laughter.
The smell of food
hitting the air
before it ever reached my hands.
I could not see the colors.
But I could hear the life.
And slowly,
I understood.
The darkness was not the enemy.
The enemy was believing
that my life had ended
when my eyesight did.
That tree took something from me.
No question.
It took the easy future.
The careless confidence.
The stupid belief
that tomorrow was guaranteed.
But it did not take everything.
It left me breath.
It left me anger.
It left me a heart
that still knew how to beat.
And that was enough.
More than enough.
Now I walk through Mexico
with a cane in one hand
and my past behind me.
I still remember Kentucky.
I still remember the tree.
Some wounds do not disappear.
They simply stop being in charge.
I cannot see the road ahead.
Maybe nobody really can.
The sighted just pretend better.
So I keep walking.
One step.
Then another.
And every step tells the darkness
the same thing.
You can surround me.
You can follow me.
You can live inside my memories.
But you do not get to decide
where I go.
Leave a Reply