Jay doesn’t like to visit because he says he feels like a bird in a glass cage up here. Trapped.
But I’ve never felt like that.
I’ve always felt free up here. Not like I was in this bizarre glass box, with everyone looking in. I’ve always felt like I was looking out at possibility.
Like we could go anywhere and be anything and nothing really mattered because Bohdan and I live here together with all our love.
It turns out, though, that things do matter. And there were things waiting out there to hurt us.
In this case, they were a weird hit into the boards, a malfunctioning helmet, and a fall to the ice.
Those things did turn this place into a cage or a box or a maze or something else awful and horrible, and they locked us in.
Just Bohdan’s brain and mine, and I’m starting to wonder if those are two things that should ever be alone together anymore.
I’m trapped now—sitting straight up on the couch, eyes not where they should be, on my comps papers, but flicking back and forth between the front door and the clock on the microwave.
He’s late.
He was supposed to skate again today. For the first time in weeks.
If I was a different person who didn’t have a brain predisposed to cruelty, I might be able to pay attention to the tiny bits of starlight winking to life in me, saying that maybe, maybe he’s late because it went so well and he’s still skating and skating and skating, setting new speed records and carving up fresh ice. Smiling the way he used to.
That maybe he’s the Bohdan I used to know. Whose head didn’t hurt and who liked sunshine and bright things and didn’t mind loud noises and got to spend his nights doing the thing he was born to do. Who didn’t seem so horribly broken and sad all the time.
But I know by the way the door opens—a slow, sad, resigned creak that echoes across the apartment and stomps all over hope I didn’t really believe in—it didn’t go well.
I ask anyway. “How did it go?”
He drops his bag, and I think if it wasn’t weighed down with so much equipment and unmet expectations, he might kick it clear across the apartment.
He slams the door instead, wincing when he does.
“Not good.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it.
Bohdan used to look at me all the time—like I was the only thing worth looking at really, and now, his eyes never land on one thing for very long, least of all me.
I’ve started to wonder if maybe I’m somehow this ugly reminder of the big, bad thing that happened to him.
But one of his neurologists said that sometimes, after head trauma, your ocular responses can shift.
I don’t think she quite understood the question. I wasn’t asking about his vision, the refraction of light, his pupils, or his eye movements.
I was asking why the man I love so much, who I think still loves me, can’t look at me anymore.
“Do you want—” I try to ask if he wants to talk, even though I already know the answer.
“No, Sloan. I don’t want.” He walks right by me when he says it, like I’m not here at all—and maybe I’m not. He goes to our bedroom, and he slams that door, too.
I think another lock clicks somewhere out there in the hall, and I wonder how long it takes to suffocate on stale air that used to feel like love.
Bohdan
Turns out Jay does have the perfect outfit for disco night.
Some sort of short-sleeve button-up with brown stripes and jarring slashes of orange and yellow.
It’s definitely psychosomatic, but the colours make my head start to hurt.
