“You first.” I’m having trouble thinking about anything but the dull ache in my knee and the random twinges of pain.
“Will you tell me about your injury?” she asks, propping her chin on her knee. It’s technically a question, but more than that, it’s a request for my vulnerability. In my weakened state, I can’t get much more vulnerable, except for talking about this.
But Abby has been vulnerable with me a lot this week, and while a college version of myself would have bristled at the request, I know better now.
“It happened during a game. Got checked bad and fell wrong, then a couple guys fell on top of me. I tore my ACL and my LCL.”
Her eyebrows knit together in pain, as if the injury were happening to me in real time and not a decade ago.
“Your turn,” she says.
“You can keep asking questions if you want.”
I’m not just offering because I’m still recovering. I want to tell her more. I want to tell her everything, but the rest of the story is stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat.
“How long was the recovery?”
“Almost a year.”
“And the dark place you mentioned the other day. That was during that time?”
I nod, averting my eyes to my hands. They’re dirty from the lighthouse railing, and I rub at my palm with a thumb. “The first six weeks after my surgery were bad. I was on crutches and I felt so… I felt so fucking weak. So pathetic. I meant what I said the other day: I would have pushed you away. Those six weeks almost killed me; they would have ruined us.”
“I think you underestimate my tolerance for your assholery,” she says with a smirk. It makes me smile, too. I’d forgotten how well Abby can balance hard conversations with a well-timed joke.
“Maybe. But I’m glad you never saw me during that time. All I did was eat, sleep, and play Fortnite. I grew my beard out, didn’t cut my hair. Everyone was so sick of my shit. After my first physical therapy session, my mom drove me straight to a barber and insisted they cut my hair and shave my beard. Something about that haircut kicked me into gear and I treated physical therapy and my recovery like a job after that.”
“You said you got back on the ice, but you left?”
“Yeah,” I say, but the word gets lost in a deep sigh. “I went back, and I tried. I tried so hard to play at the level I was at before, but every couple of weeks, I’d get some pain and have to take a break, do more physical therapy. Eventually my coach benched me and they didn’t renew my contract.”
Abby’s eyes are wide and glossy, a hand covering her mouth.
“The only real dream I ever had for my life was over before it ever really got started.”
“Oh, Miles.” Abby reaches a hand out, taking one of my hands in hers. Her gentle squeeze scrubs away at some of the resurfacing pain.
“Went to another dark place after that, but I got in therapy pretty quick and that helped. I was really lost for a while. Ran into a buddy from high school at a bar one night. He looked exhausted, and when I said so, he said he was in construction and it always left him spent, and I wanted that. I wanted to be so fucking tired at the end of every day that I didn’t have to think about everything I’d lost.”
I give her a meaningful look, because it wasn’t just my career I was mourning then. I thought about Abby more after I losthockey because I’d chosen it over her, and then I didn’t have that either. I just had regrets and what-ifs.
She rubs her thumb over my knuckles, dropping her eyes to our connected hands. “I thought about that. When you told me on my second night here that you only played for a couple years. It’s part of why I asked if you regretted breaking up,” she says.
“If you had asked me six or seven years ago if I had regrets, I would have said yes with no hesitation. But it’s complicated, because I don’t know how much I believe in regret now. Not that I think everything happens for a reason, but because now I live my life in a way where I won’t have regrets later. I learned my lesson. And I don’t know if I would have learned it if it wasn’t for the choices I made as a young, dumb twenty-something.”
She bobs her head in a thoughtful nod. “And your dad. Do you think you’ll regret not talking to him? At the end of his life. At the end of yours. Do you think you’ll wish that you had mended things with him?”
Her words are a whip cracking in my chest. I did not expect that question, and if I’m being honest, I never really considered it. No one has ever asked me that because most people know not to bring up my dad around me. I stopped therapy once we stopped talking about career transition and the topic of my family started coming up more often.
Abby has always been brave enough to talk about things she knows may upset me. She really does have a high tolerance for my assholery.
“I—uh, I don’t know.”
It’s honest and it’s all I can give her right now. But I don’t think that was the point. I think she wanted to leave me with something to think about.
Which I will.
Just not right now.
