Finding Hope: From Isolation to Intention
Chapter 1: The Fall
November 17, 2023.
I don't remember the moment I jumped. Maybe that's a blessing. Maybe it's just another hole in the timeline I'm still trying to patch together.
But I remember what led to it. The weight pressing down on my chest all day. The way Hope's absence felt like a physical thing—heavy and suffocating. I'd been walking the streets of Leavenworth for hours, circling the same blocks like some pathetic satellite orbiting a planet that didn't want me. Looking for her car. Looking for her. Looking for any sign that I still existed in her world.
The alcohol had been my companion that night. Bourbon. Too much of it. The kind of drinking where you stop tasting it, stop measuring it, just pour and swallow and pour again. Enough to make terrible decisions feel reasonable, enough to make jumping off a wall seem like the only way to make the pain visible. To make it real.
I wasn't trying to die—I don't think. That's the fucked up part. Death would've been too easy, too final. I was trying to feel something other than the crushing emptiness that had become my constant companion. I was trying to make my insides match my outsides. Break something physical to match what was already broken inside.
Standing on that wall, looking down into the darkness, my drunk brain had convinced itself of something so pathetic I can barely write it: maybe if I hurt myself badly enough, she'd have to care. Maybe if I was damaged enough, she'd come see me. Maybe if I was broken enough, I'd finally be worth fixing.
That's the logic of desperation. That's what happens when you've spent your whole life believing you're only valuable when you're useful, only worth loving when you're healing someone else. You start thinking pain is currency. That suffering might buy you some attention.
God, the things we tell ourselves when we're drowning.
What I do remember is waking up. Flat on my back. Concrete cold as a morgue slab. Darkness all around me. And pain—an ache so deep it felt like it had always been there, like I'd been born with it.
The world came back in fragments. First, the sensation of something wrong—deeply, fundamentally wrong. My body felt disconnected, like pieces of me had been rearranged while I was gone. Like someone had taken me apart and put me back together with the instructions in Chinese.
The taste filled my mouth—copper and bourbon, blood and bad decisions. My own blood. I could feel it in my sinuses, thick and wrong. Could smell it mixing with the mountain air.
I was alone. Winter wrapped itself around me like a wet sheet of metal. Twenty-seven degrees. Middle of the mountains. If it had been even a few degrees colder, this story would've ended right there in that parking lot. Just another drunk who couldn't handle his shit, frozen to death in small-town Washington.
The cold bit through my clothes, seeping into my bones like it belonged there. I could feel it stealing my body heat, degree by degree. My fingers were already numb. My face felt like a mask someone else was wearing. The kind of cold that makes you sleepy, makes you want to close your eyes and drift.
Somewhere in the fog of my consciousness, a voice whispered what I didn't want to acknowledge: You're going to die here. And for a moment—just a moment—that felt okay. Fitting, even.
Hours passed, though I didn't feel them. I wasn't conscious for most of it. Drifting in and out of a darkness that felt both peaceful and terrifying. The in-between place where you're not quite dead but not quite alive either. Where time stops meaning anything.
In those moments between consciousness and void, I saw her face. Hope. Her eyes looking at me the way they had that one perfect moment at the hotel, when we'd both said "partner" at the same time, when I thought she might actually see me. When I thought maybe I wasn't completely worthless after all.
"You want—" she'd said. "—a partner," we'd finished together.
That memory played on loop, taunting me with what I'd lost. What I'd never really had.
But something pulled me out of the darkness.
Hope. That's what I call it. Maybe it was her. Maybe just the memory of her. Or maybe it was that stubborn part of me that had survived being invisible all those years in Louisiana. But suddenly I wasn't gone—I was gasping, blinking, alive.
Disappointed to be alive, if I'm honest.
When consciousness fully returned, panic set in. I was lying in a parking lot, surrounded by cars covered in frost, but the world was empty. Silent. It was that dead hour before dawn when even the insomniacs have finally surrendered to sleep. 4:17 AM, I'd learn later. The loneliest hour of the night.
I didn't know where I was. Didn't know how I'd gotten there. But I knew one thing: I had to get home. I had to move. Not because home meant anything—home was just an RV behind a storage facility, as empty as I was. But because movement meant not dying, and apparently some part of me wasn't ready for that yet.
So I tried to stand.
The moment I shifted my weight, lightning shot up my leg. Not regular pain—something deeper, more wrong. Like my bones were grinding against each other, creating their own horrible music. Like something fundamental had been severed, disconnected from the main system.
I thought I'd sprained my ankle. That's what my drunk brain told me. Just a sprain. Walk it off. You've had worse.
So I gritted my teeth and put pressure on it.
Once.
The scream that tore out of my throat was inhuman. Primal. The kind of sound you make when your body is telling you that what you're trying to do will destroy you. The kind they probably heard back in Louisiana when I was being born, when I first learned that entering this world meant pain.
Twice.
This time, I heard something. A grinding. A wet sound that made my stomach turn. Like stepping on a bag of chips, but the chips were my bones.
Three times.
I collapsed back down, screaming into the empty street. It was a pain I didn't recognize—sharp and dull at the same time, immediate but also endless. My body rejecting itself. But still, somehow, I tried again.
The fourth attempt, I blacked out from the pain. Just gone. A mercy.
When I came to, I understood: standing wasn't an option. Whatever I'd done to my leg, whatever damage I'd inflicted in my drunken stupidity, it wasn't the kind you walked off.
The cold had started winning by then, settling into my bones like it had always lived there. I knew if I stayed still, I wouldn't make it. Hope's voice—the same one that had pulled me from unconsciousness—now whispered: Move or die. Choose.
So I started crawling.
Hands. Elbows. Gravel biting through my sleeves like tiny teeth.
The concrete was rough against my palms, tearing at my skin with each movement. My elbows scraped raw within the first few yards. I could feel the blood, warm at first, then cold as it mixed with the frost. But I kept moving because stopping meant dying, and despite everything—despite the pain, despite the stupidity that had brought me here, despite wanting to disappear—I wasn't ready to die.
Not yet. Not like this. Not as invisible as I'd lived.
I pulled myself forward inch by inch, dragging my leg behind me like dead weight. Like something that used to belong to me but didn't anymore.
Each movement was agony. My leg hung at an angle that would've made me vomit if I'd had anything left in my stomach. Every time it bumped against the ground, fresh waves of nausea rolled through me. I could feel wetness soaking through my jeans—blood definitely, maybe bone fragments, maybe worse. The fabric stuck to my skin in ways that made me not want to know what was under there.
What felt like miles was maybe a couple hundred yards. But distance doesn't mean shit when you're crawling. Every inch forward was a choice. Every movement a decision to keep going when stopping would've been so much easier.
Move forward, breathe, don't pass out. Move forward, breathe, don't pass out. Over and over, a mantra of desperation. The same rhythm I'd use months later in the RV, trying to make it through withdrawal. The same rhythm I'd been using my whole life, really. Just keep moving. Just keep breathing. Just don't disappear completely.
My vision started tunneling. Gray spots danced at the edges like static on an old TV, threatening to pull me back into unconsciousness. The cold was winning, seeping into my core now. My body was shutting down, prioritizing the vital organs, abandoning the extremities. Triaging what was worth saving.
This is where death whispered to me. Not for the first time. Not for the last.
Just lie down, it said. Just close your eyes. It doesn't hurt when you stop fighting. You've been trying to disappear your whole life anyway. Here's your chance.
And for a moment—just a moment—I considered it. The peace of surrender. The end of all this pain, all this humiliation, all this desperate crawling toward a life that had already rejected me. It would be so easy. So quiet. So final.
But then I saw Hope's face again. Not the Hope who'd walked away from me, who'd blocked me, who'd made it clear I was too much. But the Hope who'd once smiled at me like I mattered. The Hope who'd made me believe, for a brief and shining moment, that I was worth saving.
Get up, her voice said in my head. Don't you dare give up. Not now. Not when I need you to prove me right about you.
Fucking delusions. Even dying, I was making up conversations with someone who wanted nothing to do with me.
So I kept crawling.
Then I saw them. The early risers. 5 AM runners cutting through the darkness. Legs pumping. Heads down. Headphones in. Living in their own perfect worlds where bones don't break and people don't disappear.
I screamed. I waved. Nothing.
My voice came out as a croak, barely audible over the sound of their footsteps and whatever motivational podcast was flooding their ears. I tried to make myself bigger, more visible, but sprawled on the ground with a shattered leg, I was just another shadow in the pre-dawn darkness. Another piece of trash on the side of the road.
They didn't hear me. They didn't see me. And I kept crawling.
The helplessness was almost worse than the pain. Watching person after person run past, completely oblivious to my existence. I was invisible again, just like I'd always been. Just like Tyler walking past me in seventh grade. Just like every lunch table that suddenly didn't have room. Even broken and bleeding, even dying in the street, I couldn't make anyone notice me.
The thought that crossed my mind then—the thought I'm still ashamed of—was how fitting it was. How perfectly it summed up my entire existence. Even in my moment of greatest need, I was forgettable. Dismissible. Nothing. Some patterns you can't break, even with broken bones.
Eventually I reached the road, collapsed again—on my hands and knees this time—and waited.
The asphalt was cold against my palms, but it felt solid. Real. I'd made it this far, somehow. From wherever I'd fallen to here—to visibility, to the possibility of rescue. To the chance of being seen, finally, even if it took being roadkill to do it.
It had been nearly two hours since I woke up. Two hours of crawling, freezing, screaming into the dark. Two hours of thinking I just needed to get home.
But home was an RV parked behind a storage facility, fourteen feet of aluminum filled with nothing but empty bottles and the ghost of someone who never loved me the way I loved her. Home was isolation and emptiness and the constant ache of missing someone who didn't miss me back. What was I crawling toward, really? What was I trying so desperately to get back to?
Another night of talking to Hope in my head? Another bottle of bourbon? Another day of pretending I was healing when really I was just learning new ways to break?
A car finally slowed. Someone saw me.
The headlights felt like salvation, washing over me in warm, white light. Like being born again, except this time someone was actually happy to see me arrive.
The car pulled over, and I heard a door slam, footsteps running toward me.
"Oh my God, are you okay? What happened?"
A woman's voice. Kind. Concerned. The first human kindness I'd experienced in hours, maybe days, maybe months.
I tried to answer, tried to explain, but all that came out was a sob. The relief of finally being seen, finally being helped, broke something open in me that I'd been holding closed through sheer force of will. All the tears I hadn't cried. All the screams I'd swallowed. All the times I'd said "I'm fine" when I was drowning.
She stayed with me, this stranger, holding my hand while we waited for the ambulance. Telling me I'd be okay. Telling me help was coming. Being the Hope that Hope couldn't be.
The ambulance came.
Sirens. Lights. Voices calling out medical terms I didn't understand. Hands lifting me onto a gurney, strapping me down, sliding me into the back of a vehicle that smelled like antiseptic and emergency.
The paramedic—a young guy with tired eyes who'd probably seen worse but acted like he hadn't—was asking me questions I couldn't focus on. Name. Date. What happened. Pain scale from one to ten.
"Ten," I said.
But also zero. Because the physical pain was nothing compared to the emotional numbness that had driven me to that wall in the first place. You can't measure the pain of being invisible on a scale of one to ten. There's no number for the ache of loving someone who sees right through you.
"You're going to be okay," he kept saying. "We're taking you to the hospital. You're going to be fine."
But I knew, even then, that fine was relative. That even if they could fix my body, there were other things broken in me that no surgeon could reach. Things that had been broken since Louisiana, since seventh grade, since the first time I learned that disappearing was easier than being seen.
At the hospital, everything became a blur of fluorescent lights and worried faces. Nurses cutting away my clothes with scissors that felt too intimate. Doctors examining my leg with practiced detachment, poking at bones that screamed in response. X-rays. CT scans. Terms like "compound fracture" and "surgical intervention" floating through the air around me.
Both bones in my leg—tibia and fibula—snapped clean through. Not just broken. Shattered. They showed me the X-rays like I'd want to see, like I'd find it interesting. All I saw was proof of how thoroughly I'd fucked up. Even my bones couldn't hold it together.
Surgery would be next. Metal. Screws. Plates. The long rebuild. They talked about recovery time, physical therapy, the months it would take to walk again.
But none of that had hit me yet. Not the injury. Not the magnitude. Not the reality of what was coming.
All I knew in that moment was that I had to keep going. And somehow, I had.
I'd survived the fall. Survived the crawl. Survived the cold and the darkness and the whispered promises of surrender.
What I didn't know—what I couldn't have known lying there in that hospital bed, high on morphine and adrenaline—was that the real fall was still coming. That the physical break in my leg was nothing compared to the psychological break that was waiting for me.
I thought a shattered ankle was rock bottom. I had no idea you could keep falling even when you couldn't stand.
In the coming months, I would be trapped in that RV, alone with my thoughts and the ghost of Hope. I would discover that there are different kinds of rock bottom. There's the kind where you hit concrete and shatter bones. And then there's the kind where you shatter everything else—your sense of self, your grip on reality, your ability to see any reason to keep fighting.
The kind where you're texting someone who isn't there. Where you're having conversations with silence. Where you're so desperate for connection that you start creating it out of nothing, like a kid with an imaginary friend, except you're thirty-six and you know it's not real but you can't stop.
I'd survived November 17th. But November 17th was just the beginning.
The real question wasn't whether I could heal from a broken leg. The real question was whether I could heal from a broken life. Whether someone who'd been invisible since seventh grade could learn to be seen. Whether someone who'd been running since Louisiana could learn to stay still.
And that answer—that answer was still months and a lot more falling away.
But lying there in that hospital bed, leg destroyed, future uncertain, one thing was clear: I'd crawled two hundred yards with a shattered ankle to save a life that wasn't worth saving.
The question was: what the fuck was I going to do with it now?
Read the rest of the story here:
https://a.co/d/3grls0k