Not a single person on that campus who would have noticed if I didn't come out of my room for a week. Who would have texted back at two in the morning. Who would have sat with me in the silence of someone who is not okay and known, without being told, that I was not okay.
But it was an inevitable disaster of my own making. I came to Eldridge with my walls already up — new place, new people, let me read the room before I give anyone anything real — and I was so careful, so controlled, so determined not to be vulnerable in a place that hadn't earned it yet that I built my own cage and locked myself inside it and handed Marcus the only key.
And then Marcus made his choice.
I had nothing. Nothing to catch me. Nothing to hold onto. Nothing between me and the full weight of what was happening except the ice and the four walls of a dorm room and the sound of my own breathing in the dark. Completely alone. Even in a locker room full of people. And the cruelest part was the voice in my head that saidthis is your fault.
You hid yourself. You didn't let anyone in. You put all of it in one person and you knew, you knew somewhere underneathall of it, that it was too much weight for one person, who hadn't even admitted to himself what he was, to carry. Who hadn’t been with another man before.
You were stupid.
You were naive.
You loved someone who was never going to be able to love you back the way you needed and you did it anyway and now look.
Now look.
The armor didn't work.
He broke through it anyway.
And got me straight through the heart.
Left me bleeding out alone.
Fucking worthless.
I was in love for the first time and the person I loved had stood fifteen feet away and watched them write on my locker and said nothing. Had heard the jokes every single morning and said nothing. Had heard what happened in the shower and said nothing.
And I had nobody to tell. Nobody to fall apart to. Nobody that would care. Having to carry it alone in a room by myself every night and get up the next morning and carry it onto the ice and pretend it wasn't there.
The ice was the only place I could breathe.
On the ice I was just a hockey player and I was a good one and nothing else was allowed to exist. I poured everything into it — every humiliation, every sleepless night, every time I had to stand in that locker room and hear my name used as a punchline and keep my face completely still. I took all of it and I compressed it into something that came out clean and fast and hard on the ice.
I became the best.
There was a night in June. It was late. Well past midnight. Thecampus outside my window was quiet — the dead silence of a place where everyone else is asleep and you are the only person in the world who is still awake and still feeling things and still trying to figure out how to get to tomorrow.
I'd been lying there for a long time.
Not thinking exactly. More like — drowning slowly under everything I couldn't stop feeling. The exhaustion of pretending to be fine for months. The weight of the locker room every single morning. The way Marcus looked through me in the hallway now like I was someone he'd never met. The shower. The marker. The silence of people choosing not to see what was happening right in front of them. The way the blue light looked on his face when he saidI love you.The way his hands felt in my hair. The way he pushed me away so fast I stumbled.
I picked up my phone.
I scrolled through every contact I had. Every single one. Looking for a name. Looking for someone I could call who would pick up and who I could sayI'm not okayto without having to explain everything from the beginning, without having to fake being okay while I said it, without having to be anything other than exactly as broken as I actually was in that moment.
There was nobody. Because if I called my parents, or my brother, or my friends from home, I would have to explain everything that happened. And I just couldn’t. Not yet. I’d rather drown in it alone than do that. So, I put the phone down and laid in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about a lot of things. I thought about how tired I was.
The kind that doesn't go away with sleep. The kind that comes from spending every single day bracing for impact. From walking into rooms and feeling the shift. From laughing at jokes that aren't funny and saying I'm fine to people who aren't even asking and being so relentlessly, exhaustingly alone that the loneliness stopped feeling like a temporary condition and started feeling like a permanent fact about me.
Like maybe this was just what I was.
Someone people could leave.
Someone people could look through.
Someone who wasn't worth the cost of standing up for.
