The Light Fell Sideways

The Light Fell Sideways

Before the darkness swallowed me, there was sunlight, real sunlight. I was ten and had a paper route, a Schwinn bike, and a weird fascination with ants. I’d watch them for hours, hauling crumbs twice their size across the sidewalk. I respected that kind of discipline.

I loved the woods behind our house, oak, dogwood, and this one black walnut tree that always seemed like it was whispering. Back then, I believed in God, or maybe just in trees that listened.

But belief is brittle stuff. It cracks under a boot, under a belt, under silence that wraps around you like plastic wrap over a corpse.

By seventeen, the only things I delivered were lies to my parole officer and pills to people who didn’t want to be conscious anymore. I still rode a bike sometimes, stolen, usually, and the only ants I saw were the ones on the pizza crusts in alley dumpsters.

That’s where I met Crazy Janie. Hair like tumbleweed, teeth like moon slivers. She used to be a nurse. Now she fed pigeons LSD and claimed to read their thoughts. “They know what you’ve done, Billy,” she’d whisper. “They saw.”

I didn’t argue. The birds did stare.

Most nights, I wandered the streets with my tribe, ex-cons, throwaways, people released too early from Reagan’s underfunded madhouses with a pat on the back and a pocket full of Thorazine. We slept in church parking lots and under condemned freeway overpasses. Some spoke in tongues, some didn’t speak at all.

I felt more human with them than I ever did with a teacher, a pastor, or my dad.

Drugs were our sacraments. Psychedelics weren’t recreational—they were initiations. One night I took a tab that hit sideways. The street folded inward like a book page, and I stood face-to-face with a demon in a cracked storefront window. He looked like me but older. Wiser. Worse.

"You think you’re falling," he said. "But you've already landed. You're just learning how to crawl here."

When I came to, Janie was braiding copper wire into her hair and muttering something about the satellites. I nodded. Made sense.

Hope? It was a whisper I almost remembered. Like a name I once knew but hadn’t heard spoken in years.

But it was still there. Flickering. Just enough to keep me from stepping off that bridge on 9th Street. Just enough.