When I was young I fell down a bluff, deep in the woods behind my house. I fell because it was night, and I couldn’t see. Also, my eyes weren’t working because my brain wasn’t receiving images; it was locked on a single immovable blackness.

I left my home in the middle of the night because it wasn’t my home. I remember easily slipping through the window, but after touching the ground and for a long time after, portions of my memory are absent, unrecorded or maybe censored. I don’t remember what I was wearing or if it was hot or cold, raining or dry. Sensation had ended by then, everything was remote except the drive to move, a need for changing through physical action.

I guess I must have walked around the house and crashed awkwardly into the woods. Branches were lines, geometric obstacles to my destination, which was away, or over there, a moving target. Through the glimmering blackness in my mind I sensed that tree trunks and rocks were darker than the shadows they produced. But there was no moon. There was nothing. For a long time I walked through it. Then suddenly there was a breath upward and a freedom like being carried.

I landed in a heap at the bottom of the bluff, bleeding and dazed. My shoulder and some right ribs broke, and so did the blackness. It was cut by streaks of red clarity. Standing up took a long time, and as I got to my feet shards of black fell away from my vision like glass from a shattered window.

I saw the dark forest and myself in it, lost. I felt horrible pain and fear of dying. I didn’t know where to go, so I remained there.