I promised, in the very first post of this series, that I'd eventually tell you about the day I nearly died in a jackfruit tree. I have put off writing this post twice now. Not because I've forgotten what happened — I remember it in more detail than almost any other single day of my childhood — but because some memories resist being turned into sentences, and this is one of mine.

The tree was Ekyomukinene, “the one that bears big,” one of several named jackfruit trees on our land. It was everyone's favourite, mine included, because it sat low against a windswept hill in a cool, breezy stretch of ground, near the house in old coffee plantation, its branches fanning out wide and close to the earth, some barely a metre off the soil. Children could climb it in minutes. It was a secret hideout that, in practice, every child in the village knew about — which is its own small joke, but that's exactly what it was to us.

That particular day, I climbed the way I always did — in my dirty working clothes, chasing the smell of ripe fruit drifting from somewhere far out along a branch. I told myself I would stop once the fruit was in my hands. I crawled forward on my belly instead, pulling myself along with the help of smaller junction branches beneath me, and a few metres in, I heard a cracking sound behind me. I assumed it was a dry branch falling somewhere below. I kept going.

The cracking didn't stop. It grew. By the time I turned to look for it, it was already too late for me to fully understand what was happening — the crack had opened deep from the top of the branch, and only a single thread of fresh inner wood was still holding me, and everything behind me, in place. I tried to hurry back the way I'd come. I couldn't. I fell fifty metres, tangled in branches the whole way down, and what happened after that I genuinely cannot tell you, because my mind went dark and stayed dark until the next day, when I woke to being told I had somehow survived.

Writing that paragraph took me longer than almost anything else in the whole manuscript. Not because the sentences were hard to find — the sentences came almost too easily, which was its own strange discomfort — but because I had to sit, again, inside a version of myself that had no idea, in that moment, whether he was going to live. I don't think you ever fully leave that version of yourself behind. Even now, decades later, my chest tightens whenever the memory surfaces uninvited, which it still does, more often than I expected it to.

I have never climbed a tree since. Not a small one. Not even to look. It is, I think, the one fear from my childhood I never talked myself out of, and writing Chapter 7 taught me something about that: not every fear needs to be conquered to be honoured. Some of them are simply the body's way of remembering a mercy it was given once, and would rather not test twice.

I debated, right up until the final draft, whether to include this story at all. It would have been easy to leave it out — to let the book stay in the warmer, gentler parts of that chapter: the named trees, the evening walks, my father's poetry about dancing branches. But I made a promise to myself early on, writing this whole memoir, that I would show both the harvest and the weeds. This is one of the weeds. It nearly ended everything before the rest of the story had a chance to happen, and I think that's exactly why it belongs on the page.

The Dream From Dust is available for pre-order now on Amazon, with release set for February 2027, If you need to join ARC Team to get free copy in exchange for a honest review slots are still available, apply_here. If this story moved you even slightly, I'd be grateful if you'd follow along for what's coming next, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Stories like this one only survive if someone keeps telling them.

Next post: the question a chemistry teacher asked me one ordinary morning — and the answer that quietly set the rest of this book in motion.