Slow Motion

At eight years old, Troy watches a basketball leave a boy's hands-and the world stops keeping time. For three to five seconds, everything around him drags to an impossible crawl while he stays fully alert, feeling every second of the gap. No one else notices. No one ever will.

That private, unexplained slowing becomes the quiet companion of his life. It follows him through a childhood behind barred windows, through group homes and a family who hands him faith he never asked to carry, through Chicago in the years the crack epidemic hollowed out the block he grew up on, and into an adulthood spent driving across bridges, working rooftops, and holding conversations he can barely keep pace with.

He searches for a name for what happens to him-reading through conditions that almost fit and never quite do-while carrying a harder truth underneath: sharing this with anyone always felt like a risk he couldn't afford.

Slow Motion is a memoir about surviving what has no name. It doesn't promise a cure or a clean ending. It offers something plainer and more lasting: a life built, second by stolen second, in spite of everything working against it.