Page 74 of The Fall
I’ve read article after article after article about post-traumatic amnesia, brain injuries, dreamscapes, the mind’s defensive mechanisms.A mind on the brink, trying to protect itself, will rationalize and justify. It will try to make sense of the impossible.So many of the articles were trying to soothe, trying to say ‘It’s okay that you dreamed weird fucking shit.’It twists what’s familiar and unfamiliar and makes it its own.‘Don’t worry. None of it is real. None of it fucking matters.’
Hallucinations are built from the mind’s leftover pieces, scraps locked too deep to recall, woven from debris you didn’t know you carried.
Maybe I listened to those podcast episodes. Maybe I did see video clips of Tampa’s players. And maybe that’s all it took to ignite a fantasy that blazed so brightly it seared itself across my brain.
I was vulnerable. Desperate for connection. My brain—fucked-up from the hit, starving for anything to hold onto—latched onto Blair and built a world where I mattered, where I wasn’t?—
Alone.
The room spins, the walls closing in. There’s a word for this, for what’s happening inside my head.
Crazy.
There it is: the truth I’ve been circling, the truth I’ve recoiled from, running away like I can outrun the tides. None of it was fucking real. Unless I slipped into another universe, unless alternate dimensions are a reality, or time travel is something thathappensto people?—
But it’s not. You know that. You fucking know that.
The room is too quiet, too empty, for this. I’m in fucking Calgary, inside a beige box, and my mind is splitting apart. I’m thousands of miles from everything that was perfect, sun-warmed and salt-streaked andmine. I’m thousands—millions—of miles from sane.
Blair was my mooring, my lighthouse, my everything, but he’sgone. No. Worse: he never was. He’s nothing more than a made-up man, a ghost from a life I’ll never have.
I hear my teammates in the hotel hallway. Mutineers? No, the Orcas, my real teammates. They’re laughing, making plans to head out, go to dinner. No one knocks on my door. They’re leaving me behind.
I’d leave me behind, too.
My breath shudders into a whisper, then stops altogether. The air in Calgary has learned how to choke a man.
I am alone. Utterly, completely alone, and I curl into myself like paper on fire.
Blair’s eyes, his smile, the warmth of his touch—the memories—fantasies—flicker and fade, in and out. I grasp, but they slip through my fingers, insubstantial as smoke.
Tears burn behind my eyelids. I swallow hard, try to breathe through the pain. It doesn’t help. Nothing helps. The one person who could make sense of this, the one person I need more than anything?—
He doesn’t even know my name.
I shudder down the ice, my edges grinding and unstable. I’m supposed to feel power in every push, my quads coiling and releasing, but nothing holds. Blair haunts my footwork,shadowing every pivot, every turn. He’s there when I make the crossover, pulling me off-balance.
It’s all wrong without him.
I cycle pucks to no one, reroute drills that dead-end in open ice. My mind’s been bled-dry, and there’s nothing left.
Coach’s voice slashes over the ice. “Get it together, Kendrick!”
The puck flies past me. I scramble to catch up, but it’s too late. I’m late to every play. The rink is too small, too fucking close. The bench is no salvation. I hunch over, gripping my stick as if it’s my only tie to reality.
One failure spills into the next. “What the hell are you doing out there, Kendrick? You’re fucking up!” Coach roars.
The ice won’t hold. The puck catches me on the wrong edge, races past?—
Calgary zips the puck up the ice, give-and-go and get a goal. The score ticks up. We’re down one, then two, and I’m a bystander in my own collapse.
When I cycle off my next shift, Coach’s hand lands granite-hard on my shoulder. “Stay down,” he says. “You’re done for the night.”
I’m done.
My key bites into the lock, and the door swings open into a place I might have called home. Inside, my apartment breathes lifeless air over my skin. No, this place doesn’t welcome me back at all.
I drop the package I’d picked up from the apartment’s mailroom on the counter. It was here when I got back from the Calgary–Edmonton roadie, where I played part of the Calgary game and none of the one in Edmonton.
