Page 19 of The Fall
Remember.
And focus. I’m on a mission here: find myself. Follow the breadcrumbs of my life. Follow them so well I can climb inside this life, even though I’m a stranger. A cuckoo.
The living room is comfortably chaotic. There’s a massive sectional parked in front of an equally massive flat-screen TV. Water bottles and game controllers clutter the coffee table. Slides and sneakers lie kicked off at the edge of the shag throw rug. Throw pillows seem piled to support two couch-chilling options: two guys sprawled out with toes together, or two guys glued together in the corner, entangled. I curl up on one side like I can divine memories out of cotton and stuffing. Of course it doesn’t work like that. Amnesia isn’t healed by osmosis of furniture.
Still, I settle in and dig out my phone again. If I’m following breadcrumbs, there’s at least one trail that will lead me somewhere definitive. I pull up YouTube.
Before, there were dozens of videos devoted to Torey Kendrick, that washout loser, that bust of a draft pick, a has-been nobody marking time until he’s sent packing from the league. I never made the highlight reels, but I sure made it on a lot of videos of the ‘Biggest Busts.’
Now?
I don’t recognize the guy on the screen.
I’m flying down the ice, a blur of blue and white, puck dancing at the end of my stick. My dad used to tell me I had magic in my hands when I was a kid, and now it looks like I do. On my phone, I smile after burying the puck in the back of the net. This Torey, the one in the videos, is fearless. He’s a gamer, fully in control, fucking magical on the ice. He’s exactly who I dreamed I could be when I was a kid, and he’s everything I believed was dead and gone about myself.
I’m watching a shattered dream that’s been glued back together.
I’mnotthat Torey.
ThatTorey, that beautiful, confident phantom on the screen, exists only in the flickering light of this life I can’t reach. He’s a ghost haunting what I can’t touch. What hurts worse—your dream come true and losing it, or realizing it came true for someone else?
I’d rather stay on the couch and disappear than keep going after that. I should have saved the YouTube videos for never.
It takes me a while to enter our bedroom.
My clothes are mostly in the hamper, some piled beside it. In the closet, I recognize suits and button-downs and clothes in my size. The drawers have my shorts, my T-shirts, my lucky pair of boxers. In the bathroom, the second vanity has my shaving cream, the brand of razor I like, the hair pomade that works best with my mess of hair.
There are traces of me everywhere. That’s my side of the bed. That’s my phone charger on the nightstand.
Inside the drawer are cough drops, spare cables, balled-up sports wrap. Painkillers. A sketchbook, which is… I haven’t drawn in ages. I used to doodle away the hours on the long, long bus rides in juniors, filling up book after book of sketches of hockey rinks and hockey players and sweet plays.
But that was a long time ago.
Apparently, I’d gotten back into it. The sketchbook is nearly full. Mostly it’s pictures of my teammates, scenes from the rink, moments from games, real-time, freeze-frame. I suppose I have a theme.
I stop on a sketch of Blair.
It’s startling. Intimate. My pencil captured him in our bed, his gaze locked on me. He’s artfully covered by the graphite lines of a bedsheet, but everything else… He leaps off the page as if he’s about to reach for me.
I trace the lines of his jaw, the angle of his shoulder. I know the sketch can’t touch me back, but I almost expect Blair to pull me down onto the rumpled sheets and kiss me senseless.
God. The ache in my chest sharpens. I think I want what this picture promises. At the least, I want to crawl inside this memory andknow. I want to understand.
I’m sojealousof the Torey from yesterday who lived all of this, whohadall of this.
I don’t remember loving Blair, but I must—deeply. Why else would I pour so much of my heart and longing into this sketch?
I close the sketchbook and tuck it back into the drawer.
On Blair’s nightstand, there’s a bottle of lube, and in his drawer, there’s a box of ultra-thin condoms.
I mean, I knew. I knew what it meant to be with a man, to wake up in bed with a man who says he loves you and kisses you in the dark.
A year ago, two years ago, three years ago, I’d had a thought here and there, a midnight curiosity and a stray porn search, but that was it. If I thought about it, well. Everyone thought about it, right? And if I sometimes dreamed about someone kissing me who was bigger than me, taller, bulkier? And if I liked those dreams, maybe too much, and would sometimes wake up andwant?—
How did I traverse myself? How did I go from my own refusal to wonder—even for an hour, or the length of a single daydream—to this? How did I let myself be happy?
God, I fucking wish Iremembered.
