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3.

When I was 6 I began passing out unexpectedly. I saw many doctors and specialists, but every test came back negative or proved inconclusive. It would happen almost exactly every 3 months. The first time it happened I was staying with my grandparents for the week. I had just sat down at the table to eat the goulash dinner that my grandmother had prepared, when suddenly I fell face-first into my plate. I stayed there for a second and then tumbled backward onto the floor, pulling the tablecloth and goulash with me. When I woke up, I barely heard my grandfather hollering at me to stop screwing around and I could hardly tell that my grandmother was rushing to my side to see if I was hurt. I say that I barely heard them because there was a pounding in my head that would rival the Michigan State drum line.

Like I said, this sort of thing would happen once every 3 months, almost on the dot. It happened once in the school cafeteria, several times while I was at home, on the bus, in class, at recess. It didn’t matter what I was doing. It was like clockwork. My eyes would slowly go black, I would usually say something like, “here we go again,” and then I would fall forward and then violently backward. It didn’t matter if I braced myself or not, the same thing always happened.

When I would come to, the cloudiness would slowly leave my eyes and my head would start to tingle the way your foot does when you sit on the toilet for too long. After about 5 seconds, the headache would start. It would always come slowly at first, just behind my eyes, and then move forward covering my eyeballs and quickly spreading outward to my temples and the rest of my skull. It was the worst pain that I had ever felt. It seemed as if my brain was rapidly swelling to 5 times its normal size and trying to burst out of every hole that it could find. My eyes felt the way grapes would feel (if they could feel anything) while being squeezed for wine.

All of that was nothing compared to the pain that swept through my head when I began to wake up. It came quick like a raging bull. Starting at the base of my neck it rushed forward between my eyes and shot out to my temples. I was nearly blinded by the pain as it surged into my eyeballs. I closed my eyes in a tight squint and brought my hands to my temples.

I lay there across the tracks in the fetal position for several minutes clutching my head and reeling in pain. If a train had run me over just then, I would have been relieved. The pain was so intense that I couldn’t put together any logical thought. So, when I opened my eyes and looked up, I didn’t realize what it was that was dangling above me. Through the pain my mind barely registered “Nike.” I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Everything around me was a blur. I closed my eyes again and tried to get some control over the rest of my body. I felt as if I have been taken over by some alien being which had miscalculated the proper connections with my brain in order to take control. It had control alright, just not any useful control. I was frozen; incapable of the slightest thought or movement. I twitched involuntarily. I was no longer human. I had lost the ability to reason. The only thought I could bring myself to have was pain. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain.

Luckily for me, the pain was only temporary. The swelled feeling began to subside and my brain seemed to return to its normal size. My muscles began to relax and move my body out of the fetal position. I lay there on my back with my arms and legs sprawled out, feeling as if my body had been finally released from a torturous prison. After several seconds my sight went from black, to grainy, to blurry, to clear. Again I registered “Nike” in my mind, but this time I knew what it meant.

What I saw above me as my eyes cleared sent chills down my spine. For a moment I was unable to move again, this time out of fear rather than pain. As soon as I could move I rolled off of the tracks and tried to get up. I scrambled onto my hands and knees. Before I could get to my feet a rush of heat came over me. The blurriness came back into my eyes and I vomited on the ground in front of me. I stayed on my hands and knees for several minutes until I was able to stand. I slowly turned back around keeping my eyes at the ground. I didn’t want to look back up, but I knew that I had to. My eyes rose slowly carefully registering everything that they saw. Nike. Denim. Flannel. Beard. Face. Hair. Rope.

As the full picture came into view I saw a young man hanging from his neck by a rope attached to the arch I was standing under. His shoes were covered with mud, his jeans ripped and soiled, his flannel shirt partly unbuttoned and stained with several years of hard life. His beard was untrimmed and thick. His hair was long and brown and looked unwashed. His face, though young, seemed as if it had seen more than most do in a lifetime.

I quickly recognized who it was that I was looking at. Two years earlier my first grade teacher’s son had run away from home and presumably hopped a train out of town. He was 17 at the time. He was now 19, but looked far older. I wondered where he had been, what he had seen, what had made him age so quickly, what had driven him from home, what had led him to this?

His name was Jacob Avery and there he hung.