Chapter 8: Yo, Big Guy — Are You Listening?
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I'm not a particularly religious person. Not in the traditional, church-on-Sundays, hands-in-the-air sense. But there are moments — specific, undeniable moments — where I look up and have a conversation with whatever is running this simulation.
"Yo. Big Guy. Are you listening?"
Sometimes I think the answer is yes. Sometimes I think I'm just talking to the ceiling. Most days, it's somewhere in between.
Here's what I know: the ceiling hasn't complained yet. And I've been talking to it for sixteen years. If nothing else, it's a patient listener.
The accident brought me to God the way most disasters do: through the back door, on my hands and knees, unannounced.
I'm not going to tell you it transformed me into a believer. That would be a clean story, and clean stories about broken necks are usually lying about something. What I will say is this: you get very theological very quickly when you're lying in a hospital at twenty-four, looking at the ceiling, and wondering what the actual point was.
It was somewhere around the third or fourth night at Baptist Memorial in Oxford. The ICU. The hum of machines. The shift change at four in the morning when a different nurse came in and adjusted something on the pole next to my bed without making eye contact. I was staring at the ceiling — which I was going to be doing a lot of — and I said something out loud. Not loudly. Barely above a whisper.
"I don't know what you're doing. But I'm still here. So there's something. I don't know what. But something."
That was it. No drama. No tears. No bargaining about walking again or any of that. Just a twenty-four-year-old from Madrid, Spain — Air Force kid, born on the move, used to starting over — lying in a hospital in Mississippi talking to a ceiling about the raw fact of still being alive.
It wasn't faith. I don't know if I'd call it faith even now. It was more like opening a line of communication. Saying: I don't have the infrastructure for formal religion right now. I don't have the bandwidth. But I'm not closed to this. Whatever this is.
The line has been open since.
Not "why me" — I got through that question faster than most people would expect. "Why me" is a dead-end question. It assumes the universe owes you an explanation, and the universe is very clear about not owing anyone anything. No, the question that kept me up was different. It was operational.
Okay. This happened. I'm still here. Now what?
That's a prayer, by the way. Most people don't recognize it because it doesn't start with "Dear Lord" and it doesn't end with "Amen." But any honest question directed at the ceiling when you've got nothing left to lose — that's a prayer. The format doesn't matter. The desperation does.
Religion, I've come to understand, is available to answer the unexplainable. The explanations are never conventional and always multilayered. And for a guy like me — who needs to understand the architecture, who runs simulations, who wants to know the why before the what — that used to be frustrating.
It's less frustrating now. Not because I found the answers. Because I got comfortable with the questions.
My theology, if I have one, isn't found in a building. It's found in pattern. Structure. The sense that events aren't random even when they look random. I grew up with a dad who flew F-117 Nighthawks and F-16 Fighting Falcons — a man who understood systems, who trusted physics, who operated inside frameworks of extreme precision. Some of that got into me. I can't believe in chaos. I keep looking for the architecture underneath.
And I keep finding it. Not in ways that would hold up in court. But in ways that are documented in my own life.
There's a line I heard once: "The only day we live is the day we die."
Sevendust. A heavy metal band from Atlanta. They aren't typically where people find spiritual clarity, but here we are.
I thought about that line for years. At first it read like nihilism. The only day we live is the day we die. Like life is just the preamble to the ending.
But now I read it differently. I read it as a reminder that the whole thing is finite. That you are, in fact, burning through your supply. And the question isn't whether you'll run out — you will — the question is what you're spending it on while you've still got it.
That's not depressing. That's clarifying. When you stop pretending the tank is infinite, you start being a lot more intentional about where you drive.
I almost died in four feet of water at twenty-four. That kind of near-miss gives you a relationship with mortality that most people don't develop until they're seventy. It's like getting the answer key to the final exam fifty years early — except the answer key just says "it ends" and doesn't tell you when.
So you have a choice. You can spend the remaining time panicking about the ending. Or you can spend it doing something with the middle.
I chose the middle. Took me a while. But I chose it.
There was a bargain I made early on that didn't go the way I expected.
I told myself — told the ceiling — that if I could just get some function back in my hands, I would use them for something that mattered. Dumb prayer. Incomplete prayer. The kind you make when you're new at this and you think you can negotiate.
I got partial function. Not what I asked for. Not what I meant. My hands work in the limited way that a C6-C7 injury allows — tenodesis grip, the way my fingers close when I extend my wrist. It's not what the twenty-four-year-old in the ICU was picturing when he made that offer.
But here's the thing about partial answers. You can spend your life mad about what you didn't get, or you can look at what you actually have and figure out what to build with it.
I type with these hands. I run a business with these hands. I write with these hands. I hold Beka's hand with these hands — which is not nothing, not even close to nothing. That bargain I thought I lost? Maybe I just didn't understand the terms.
I keep my circle small.
People ask about that sometimes. They notice that I don't broadcast, don't accumulate, don't build a massive social infrastructure. And the honest answer is uncomfortable:
I keep my circle small because I don't want the people who care about me to be too sensitive to my final departure. They don't deserve that weight. The more people who are deeply connected to me, the more wreckage when the ride ends.
I know how that sounds. I know it reads like despair, or like I've already written myself off. That's not what I mean.
What I mean is: I'm not naive about what my body costs. I live in it. I feel what it takes to get through a day, what it requires of the people around me, what a demanding roommate this wheelchair is. I am acutely aware that I am fighting a longer battle than most, with less equipment than I started with.
So I choose my people carefully. I invest deeply rather than broadly. I would rather have three people who truly know me than three hundred people who know of me.
That's not giving up. That's concentration. That's making the most of the real estate I have.
And honestly? The people inside the circle are better for it. When you only let a few people in, those people get all of you. Not the diluted version. Not the performance. The full thing. The good parts and the ugly parts and the 3 AM parts that don't make it onto social media.
That's the trade. Smaller circle, deeper investment. Less breadth, more depth. It's a portfolio strategy, if you think about it. And I've always been better with concentrated bets than diversified ones.
Here's where I get honest with you, and I'll ask you to read it carefully before you react:
There have been moments — not small ones — where I didn't know what I was doing here. Not in the cosmic sense, though that too. In the practical sense.
What is my purpose? Who does this actually serve? What am I building, and for whom?
I used to think my calling was helping people. I'm a natural giver. I gravitate toward it. I find genuine joy in being useful to someone who needs it. But there's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from giving consistently to people who don't receive it well, or who mistake your generosity for weakness, or who take what you've offered and use it as a weapon.
When that happens enough times, you start to question the calling itself. Maybe my help is never enough. Maybe I'm not enough.
I don't stay in that place. I don't live there. But I've visited it, and I think the honesty requires saying so.
There's a responsibility to having a giving personality. And that responsibility is to surround yourself with people you can trust rather than wonder about. It's the only way to find fulfillment with your purpose. If you keep pouring into cracked containers, you're not generous — you're just wet.
I had to learn that the hard way. Multiple times. Because I'm stubborn, and because the voice in my head that says help them, they need you is louder than the voice that says they're using you, walk away. The first voice sounds noble. The second sounds selfish. Figuring out which one is actually looking out for you — that takes years.
2016 was a particular stretch of those visits.
I was keeping timestamped notes on my phone back then. Late-night deposits — fragments I'd tap out before they dissolved. Not journal entries exactly. More like depositions. Evidence of what I was processing at three in the morning when sleep wasn't available and the questions were loud.
February 9th. Eleven in the morning.
"Disability is my canvas, experience is my medium and my brain is the brush. Now why do I keep painting this damn smiley face?"
I wrote that and half-laughed. Then the laugh ran out.
Because it was true. I'd built this whole framework — real, hard-won, legitimately earned — and I was almost exclusively using it to keep other people comfortable. Don't let them see the underneath. Lead with the punchline. Make the dark joke before someone else does. Smile on the canvas.
Two weeks later, another note:
"Wisdom is the accomplishment of stress. Your gray hairs prove just that."
I was thirty. I felt sixty. The gray hairs were coming in and they were each carrying a résumé.
That's when the ceiling conversations got more specific.
Not why did this happen to me — I'd worn that thread bare years earlier. This was operational. Okay. It happened. I'm here, still. What exactly is the assignment?
The silence held, as usual. But I started reading it differently. Less like nobody home. More like — you already know the answer, stop waiting to be handed it.
That messed with me. Because if the answer was already inside me, that meant I'd been ignoring it. Or worse — I'd been hearing it and choosing the smiley face instead.
Maybe that's what people call faith. I genuinely don't know what to call it. What I know is something shifted that year. The questions didn't disappear — they're still very much alive — but the panic behind them quieted. I stopped waiting to understand before I moved. I just moved.
Still keeping the notes, though. Some habits are worth keeping.
October 2011. Two years out from the accident.
I got on a horse.
Not metaphorically. An actual horse. A big one named Buckwheat. I posted about it: "Standing up to Buckwheat." Nobody knew if they should laugh or cry, and honestly that was exactly right.
The horse didn't know I was supposed to be fragile. Didn't read the chart. Didn't get the briefing about C6-C7 and limited hand function and the fact that I technically shouldn't have been up there at all. Buckwheat just stood there, massive and warm and completely indifferent to my medical history, and let me ride.
For an hour, I was just a guy on a horse instead of a guy in a chair.
That's the coincidences file. Not all of it looks dramatic. Some of it looks like a horse who didn't read the prognosis. But it adds up. Evidence of a life that kept finding ways to say: you're not done yet.
April 8, 2024. Total solar eclipse. Delta died.
She was fourteen. Born January 20, 2010 — six months after the accident. She came into my life when I was still raw, still figuring out how to be the new version of myself, and she stayed for all of it. Every chapter. Every bad night. Every good morning.
She died on the day the moon blocked the sun and the world went dark in the middle of the afternoon.
Tell me that's nothing. Go ahead. I'll wait.
I don't know if God or the universe or whatever is running this place actually arranged the timing. I don't know if it was a coincidence so large it looked like design, or design so elegant it looked like coincidence. I know this: Delta spent her whole life being exactly where I needed her, exactly when I needed her. And she left on a day when the entire planet stopped to look up at the sky.
That's the coincidences file. That's the biggest entry in it.
I talked to the ceiling that night. Not about why. Not about the fairness of it. Just the same thing I said in the ICU fifteen years earlier, in a different register.
I don't know what you're doing. But I'm still here. So there's something.
Valentine's Day, 2023. They put the spinal cord stimulator in.
The timing is genuinely funny to me. A device implanted on the day dedicated to love. A device that sends electrical signals through my spine to intercept the pain signals, to make my nervous system less of a war zone. They literally put wires in my back that talk to my nerves in a language the pain can't decode.
Valentine's Day.
I don't know if that's the universe being poetic or the scheduler at the surgical center not checking a calendar. Doesn't matter. I added it to the file.
The thing about the coincidences file is it's not proof of anything. It's not an argument. It's a collection of data points that, taken together, suggest — just suggest — that there might be more structure to this than a pure random-number generator would produce.
A guy who shouldn't have survived a pool in Oxford, Mississippi. A service dog born six months after the accident, died on a solar eclipse. A spinal stimulator installed on Valentine's Day. A fiancée who walked in at exactly the moment he was finally ready.
That's not an accident. That's a pattern.
And I'm a guy who looks for patterns.
"There's a responsibility to having a giving personality and a sense of purpose. And that is to surround yourself with people you can trust rather than wonder about. It's the only way to find fulfillment with your purpose."
That's the answer I've come to.
The problem was never the giving. The problem was the recipients. I was depositing into accounts that weren't real. I was broadcasting signals to stations that weren't receiving.
The work — the actual spiritual work — was learning to direct the energy correctly. Not to give less, but to give better. Not to close down, but to be more selective about where the doors open.
So yes, Big Guy. I'm listening. I'm not sure you always are. But I keep the line open.
Because here's the thing about surviving what I've survived: you develop a complicated relationship with whoever or whatever was supposedly overseeing it all. You don't get to just cruise through a near-drowning, a severed spinal cord, sixteen years of a body that never cooperates, and maintain a simple theology.
You get something messier. Something more personal. A running conversation with an entity whose answers are mostly silence and occasionally something that looks a lot like a coincidence.
The coincidences file is thicker than I expected, by the way. Surviving something that had no business being survived. Meeting the right person at exactly the wrong time, which turned out to be the right time. A door opening that I had no legitimate reason to know about. None of it passes scientific review. None of it is provable in any court.
But it's documented in my own lived experience. And I was the one in the room.
I've made my peace with that.
The purpose reveals itself in the living. Not in the waiting to understand it. Not in the tidy narrative where everything makes sense at the end. But in the accumulated evidence of a life that kept finding reasons to continue — even when the reasons were hard to see.
Wisdom is the accomplishment of stress. Your gray hairs prove just that.
People ask me if I'm angry. At God, at the universe, at whoever or whatever was supposedly in charge of the pool deck in Oxford on the night of July 3rd.
The honest answer is: I was. Not loudly. Not in the dramatic, shaking-my-fist-at-the-sky way. Just quietly, in the way a fire burns in a basement — present, consuming things at the structural level, while everything above looks fine.
The anger was heaviest around year three. When the novelty of survival wore off and the reality of this is the rest of your life settled in with its full weight. That was when the late-night conversations with whatever I was talking to shifted from requests to arguments. You could have prevented this. You had access to the data. You let this happen anyway.
The silence didn't answer any differently.
But here's what I've come to understand about the silence: it isn't empty. It's full. Full of evidence, if you choose to read it that way. Full of the people who showed up. Full of the doors that opened after the one I expected got shut. Full of Delta, and Beka, and the Thursday nights, and the stimulator on Valentine's Day, and the book I'm finishing right now.
That's not nothing. That's, in fact, quite a lot.
I don't know if the Big Guy planned it. I don't know if anyone planned it. What I know is that I'm still here, still on the line, still filing the coincidences, still doing the work.
The line stays open.
Yo, Big Guy. Are you listening?
Yeah. I think I am too.
I'm forty. I've earned every single one.