The hinge creaked as it opened and shut. I was at the door, hiding behind it, playing with the sound, the way I always did when I wanted to scare my mom. The hinge went open. The hinge went back. But this time, I wasn’t as careful. The hinge fell off. It broke. The window beside the door fell, hitting a nearby rock and shattering. Glass shards flew everywhere, stabbing into my legs. I bled, watching the bright red mix with the scattered glass on the ground.
My mom was in the room, lying on the floor. She had overdosed on fentanyl. She didn’t know I was there, crying, screaming for help. I just wanted to play. But for some reason, unbeknownst to me, no one wanted to play with me.
Disoriented and scared, I stumbled into the woods behind our house. My vision was blurry, my legs stinging from the cuts. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. But then I saw something strange—something glowing. It was a small stone, no bigger than a marble, glowing with a blackish-pink hue.
I picked it up. Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of light. Everything around me turned pink, but nothing disappeared. The trees, the house, the sky—they were all still there. My vision was sharper than ever before. I could see every individual fiber in the trees, every speck of dust in the air, every grain of sand on the ground. I could even see the splinters in the wood that held up our house. It was beautiful.
Just then, my mom’s voice cut through the strange silence. She called my name, “Billy!” Startled, I dropped the stone. It rolled away, disappearing into a small hole in the ground. I heard a faint splash as it fell into water below.
My mom rushed over and picked me up. When I looked down, the glass was gone from my legs. The cuts were healed, as if nothing had happened. I felt confused. I thought I must have been dreaming. But I hadn’t been. The pain was real. The blood was real.
Little did I know, this was only the beginning. I was just seven years old when this happened, but it was the start of something much bigger. Something revolutionary.
