Page 39 of Puck Wild
I opened it to a blank page and stared at the white space until my eyes watered. Finally, I started writing.
They weren't polished lyrics designed to go viral. It wasn't clever wordplay that deflected real emotion. It was the raw, bleeding truth that lived under my skin:
Gravity keeps pulling me down
to the places I’ve been
where I broke what I touched
and I touched everything
You move like precision
like someone who knows
where all the pieces belong
and I’m chaos in cleats
Alphabetized your cinnamon
never alphabetized me
but maybe that's the point—
some things can’t be filed
What if I’m the storm
that ruins your quiet?
what if quiet
is what I need to learn?
I set the pen down. The words were naked on the page, stripped of the armor I usually wrapped around anything real.
Through the thin walls, I heard the shower turn on. Three-fifteen a.m.—ridiculously late or early for Evan. He probably couldn't sleep either.
I closed the notebook and walked back to bed, but I didn't lie down. Instead, I picked up the puck again, turning it over in my hands like a prayer bead.
The weight of it was perfect. Regulation size and regulation heft. No different from a thousand other pucks I'd touched in a lifetime of hockey.
Except this one mattered.
This one came from hands that alphabetized spice racks, baked stress cookies, and rapped his knuckles against my shin pads in moments that meant everything.
"Don't label it," I whispered to the darkness. "Don't make it real."
But it already was real. I sighed and climbed back into bed.
The shower shut off. In a few minutes, Evan would pad back to his room in that gray hoodie he wore like armor, and I'd have to pretend I wasn't lying in bed thinking about the precise way his fingers had brushed mine.
I'd have to pretend we were still only teammates learning to coexist.
I'd have to pretend the unlabeled puck on my nightstand wasn't the most honest thing anyone had ever given me.
Outside, Thunder Bay slept under October stars; somewhere in the distance, Lake Superior whispered its secrets against the shore.
