I know the difference tonight.
I need to do this part alone.
I get up. Go to the bathroom. Look at my reflection in the mirror above the sink, which is something I’ve been doing slightly more of lately because Gisele once told me that people who avoid mirrors are usually avoiding something else and she was correct and I hate it.
The man in the mirror looks tired. He looks like someone who has been carrying something heavy for three days and is almost done carrying it.
He looks like someone who has things to lose.
Good, I think. That’s new. That’s the whole point.
I brush my teeth. Strip down to my boxer briefs. Go back to bed. Lie in the dark and do the thing again—go through the list, name the things, let them exist without trying to fix them or contain them or outrun them.
Fear.
Exposure.
Grief for the closed-off version of myself that kept me safe and kept me alone.
Pride. That one is new tonight—it surfaces somewhere around midnight, and it surprises me the way the grief did. Pride in the team. In what they’ve built. In the timeout gameand the Emotion Night win and the practice two days ago where the power play ran clean three times without a single correction. Pride in Shep, who is a chaotic force of nature and one of the best players I’ve ever shared ice with and my friend, whether I’ve said that out loud or not.
Pride in myself. That one is the strangest and the most uncomfortable and the one I sit with the longest. I am not naturally a man who thinks well of himself. But I did the hard thing. I let someone in. I learned to ask for help and name my feelings and trust my team and love a woman I’d been loving for twelve years without admitting it.
That’s not nothing.
That’s the whole thing, actually.
The evaluation can look at whatever it wants. The file can have the video. The league can run its protocol. But the man who sat in the middle of Main Street because he’d run out of ways to hold everything together alone is not the man who’s going to walk into that office tomorrow.
I fall asleep somewhere around one.
The alarm goes off at five-forty-seven.
I’m already awake.
I go through the routine. Coffee, French press, four scoops, two hundred degrees, four minutes, because some things survive everything and this is one of them. Stretching, the physical therapy sequence, thirty seconds per position. Eggs—three, scrambled, spinach, one piece of toast, protein shake.
I eat alone at the kitchen table in the early morning quiet and feel, for the first time in three days, something approaching calm.
Not the false calm of suppression. Not the brittle calm of a man holding himself together through sheer force of will.
Just calm. The kind that comes from having done the work. From having sat in the dark and named the things and let them be real and survived them.
Gisele taught me that.
I pick up my phone.
Me:Today’s the day. I’m ready.
I hit send. Put the phone in my jacket pocket. Pick up my keys.
Her response comes before I reach the door
Gisele:I know you are. I’ll be here when it’s done.
Then, after a beat:You’ve been ready for longer than you know. I believe in you, Hothead.
I stand in my doorway for a moment, reading that.
