Chapter 6 — The Cracks
I remember the hang time.
Not the slip. Not the impact.
The space in between.
The moment where gravity hadn’t finished its decision yet.
Time stretched longer than it should have. Long enough to realize something had gone terribly wrong. Long enough to understand that I wasn’t going to land on my feet.
Long enough to know I might die.
It was the day before Thanksgiving in 2003. Cold. The kind of morning where your breath hangs in the air for a second before disappearing. I was working with a family member, painting a house in one of the nicer areas of town. The kind of neighborhood where the houses sit high and the backyards slope away into hills.
The job needed to be done quickly. Done cheaply. No complaining. Do what you’re told.
The setup should have been a warning.
Ten feet of scaffolding sitting on a slope in the backyard. On top of that, a twenty-four-foot ladder leaned nearly straight up the side of the house to reach the trim near the roofline.
No harness. No safety equipment. Nothing but gravity waiting underneath.
I remember mentioning it. Saying something about how sketchy it looked. Even complaining a little.
That didn’t go over well.
When you grow up in certain environments, fear isn’t something you admit to. It’s something you push through. So despite every instinct telling me it wasn’t smart, I climbed.
Each rung felt heavier than the last.
My hands gripped the ladder tighter than they needed to. My feet felt less stable the higher I went. I remember trying not to look down because the angle made the ground feel much farther away than it already was.
Eventually I made it to the top.
I even got a few strokes in with the brush.
One. Two. Three.
For a moment I thought maybe I’d been overreacting.
Then I leaned for the fourth stroke.
And the world disappeared beneath me.
The ladder shifted just enough that the small sense of stability I had vanished instantly. The next thing I knew I was falling.
Not sliding. Not climbing down.
Falling.
There’s a moment when you fall where your body knows before your mind catches up. Everything inside you locks up at the same time. Your muscles tense. Your jaw clenches. Your eyes squeeze shut.
I braced for impact.
But the strangest part was how much time there was to think.
People imagine falling as something that happens instantly. But in those seconds, time stretched wide open. My mind ran through thoughts faster than I could process them.
This is how it ends?
The day before Thanksgiving?
After everything I’d already survived in life… an embarrassing fall from a ladder is what takes me out?
I had just started discovering my path as a DJ. Music had begun opening doors inside me that had been closed for years. I felt like I had finally found something that made sense.
And now I was about to die before I could even tell the story.
I didn’t scream.
There wasn’t time.
All I could do was clench my teeth, tighten my face, and brace for what I knew was coming.
Then my face hit the concrete.
Everything went black.
When I woke up again, I wasn’t on the ground.
I was in a hospital.
My face had taken the full force of the fall. My left orbital bone was shattered. My ribs were fractured. The damage required reconstructive surgery almost immediately.
The surgery was scheduled for the day after Thanksgiving.
I don’t remember being wheeled into the operating room.
But I remember what happened inside it.
At some point during the procedure, something went wrong.
My heart stopped.
Flatline.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. But somehow I was aware. I remember hearing voices—doctors and nurses talking quickly, the tension in the room rising.
Then the sounds faded.
The operating room disappeared.
And suddenly I was somewhere else.
The best way I can describe it is calm. Not dramatic. Not chaotic. Just calm in a way that didn’t make sense given what had just happened.
I saw my grandfather.
But he wasn’t the older man I remembered growing up. He looked younger. Stronger. Like a version of himself from years before.
The setting looked like a classroom.
I remember him explaining something about numbers. Patterns. How everything in life follows patterns if you know how to ask the right questions.
Music made sense in a completely different way.
Seven notes.
Then the eighth.
The octave.
The same pattern repeating again and again, expanding outward with infinite possibilities.
It felt less like learning something new and more like remembering something I had forgotten.
Then the calm vanished.
Voices rushed back in.
Movement.
Chaos.
The operating room snapped back into place around me.
My heart had started again.
Later, after I recovered enough to talk, I shared what I remembered with my family.
They were stunned by some of the details I described—things I shouldn’t have known or remembered the way I did.
They believed I had been somewhere else.
That it simply wasn’t my time yet.
I’ve spent years thinking about that moment. Trying to understand it.
Maybe it was something spiritual.
Maybe it was the brain reacting to trauma.
Maybe it was something else entirely.
What I know for certain is this:
I didn’t come back fearless.
I came back aware.
Aware that life moves in patterns.
Aware that choices echo farther than we realize.
Aware that endings rarely arrive the way we expect them to.
In music, when the seventh note resolves into the octave, the pattern doesn’t stop.
It begins again.
Life works the same way.
Sometimes what feels like a fall is just the beginning of the next movement.
—End of Chapter 6—