The Fall

by Tal Bauer

When you’re small and hungry, you don’t fear the future, and you never imagine that all your single-minded grit and grind can lead to you being brokenhearted and standing on a midnight beach with nothing left to lose. So what do you do when you’ve grown up with a drive gouged on the inside of your bones—play for this one thing, this one thing, the only thing I craved and yearned and strove for—and it collapses? Or when you collapse because the reality of you cannot bear the real world, burdened by your hopes and dreams?

What then? It’s a question I’m asking all the time because the version of me that I believed in, the me I thought I would become, has never materialized. He has never existed, and the man I am today is only an echo of my broken dreams. I don’t know how to be a man who won’t give up; I don’t know how to be a man who doesn’t give up on himself. And I’ve tried so hard to become someone else. I don’t remember what tomorrow is supposed to look like, and I don’t know what to do.

I want it to stop. I want to hold on to the silence of a world where I’m the only thing in it. And I’m so tired of being alone. I dreamed once of being part of something larger than myself, something that would always support me, something I could never disappoint. I still want that. A hopeless part of me clings to happy endings. I want destiny, and forever, and my name stamped in silver that screams to the universe that I existed, that I mattered.

Shadows paint his jaw, his cheekbones, his lips. God, his lips. I don’t remember, but there are things that are instinct, known all the way down in my bones. He hums when he’s happy. He can make me come undone with his slightest hold. His touch is sweet and soft in places no man has ever been on me. This body I inhabit but don’t recognize responds like it was made for him.

What do I say to the man who loves me when I can’t remember holding his hand?

God. The ache in my chest sharpens. I think I want what this picture promises. At the least, I want to crawl inside this memory and know. I want to understand. I’m so jealous of the Torey from yesterday who lived all of this, who had all of this.

Right now, I want the memory of our first kiss back more than anything I’ve ever wanted, because if I had that, I might have the courage to reach for him and pull him in.

Maybe in this life, in this version of me, being good is as easy as breathing.

It’s such a strange thing to be happy and devastated all at once. And, God, the fear. I am afraid to touch this life I have, to hold it, to breathe on it, to walk too close in case it shatters or twists away or slips through my fingers.

This love is a language my soul understands, even if my mind is struggling to catch up.

Everything I’m missing is right here, with him. There’s nothing else I need. My last thread of consciousness is tethered to Blair’s touch, to his lips on my shoulder as he kisses me, slowly, gently. So this is what it feels like to be found.

Loving him is muscle memory, but touching him... It still feels like a line I’ve never dared to cross.

All of my terror, all of my fear, melt away. It’s Blair; my heart and soul know him. I’m hypnotized by him.

My skin is too tight, like it’s a layer that needs to be peeled off to get to the real me.

“You come to warm me up or steal the hot water?” I squeeze his ass. “Stealing all of you.”

What do I want? Everything. I want to claw back the year I’ve lost, and I want his body to tell me who I am. I want to be whole again, more than this half‑person stumbling through memories, and I want to lose myself in him until I forget that I’ve forgotten anything at all.

I’m caught between the pull of the past and the heat of the present, between the man I was and the one I could be in his arms. I need the memories we’ve made and the ones we haven’t yet. I need all of him, in every way imaginable.

His lips brush my temple. I don’t remember loving him, but like this, with his heart thudding against mine, I can’t imagine not.

What if I’m not partway to rebuilding my memories but halfway to losing them completely?

Was it like this the first time I fell for him? This all-consuming, this obliterating, this redefining?

I know, as deeply as any man can know a foundational truth: Blair and I are meant to be together. On the ice, off the ice. We are two halves of one singularity.

We are two halves of a single motion, a perfect, unspoken rhythm. We finish and come to a screaming stop chest-to-chest, breathing each other in.

God, his mouth feels like a homecoming, and I melt into him, boneless. The kiss deepens slowly, like honey dripping from a spoon. His lips were made for kissing me.

It scares me how deep this love runs when I have no memory of how we got here. Every atom of me is oriented toward him. He is my North Star.

“When you laugh like that…” The heat of his hand has spread, blooming across my skin like watercolor on wet paper. “It might be my favorite sound in the world.”

How do you describe something you’ve never experienced before? How do you put words around feelings you’ve never felt before? I want to burn this moment into my broken memory so deeply that it can never be stolen away again. Nothing’s truly lost until you forget the taste of another man’s lips. And I will never forget him.

I want this. I want to be Blair’s warm body in the night, the hand he reaches for, and the man he opens his eyes to.

You are the part of me I never knew was lost, my missing piece I never knew I needed.

How do I explain that my future is a person, not a picture? “Honestly? I want to be wherever you are.”

There is a deep and final shift in my soul when it recognizes its other half and knows it is finally home. My future has a name, and that name is Blair, and this night defines our forever.

“I never used to believe in soul mates,” he breathes. “But you…” The mattress gives beneath us as he lays me down and settles above me. I cradle his face, feel his stubble catch against my fingertips as I trace the angle of his cheekbone, the curve of his lower lip. “You are my forever.”

God, we had small pieces of heaven in our hands, torn down from the sky, together. I remember⁠— The way his lips parted on a gasp after our first kiss, the way his hands cradled my face. Waves, gentle waves, lapping against our toes. His eyes, his eyes, when he looked at me and⁠—

Maybe I did imagine this all-consuming, life-altering love for a man I’ve never met. Or maybe it’s the other way around; maybe this is the dream.

“And what’s the date?” “March 22,” I whisper. A lifetime ago. A blink ago.

Two weeks. Fourteen sun-drenched and perfect days. It felt real. It all felt so real. But it wasn’t, and it isn’t. He never held me like that, and I’m in love with a lie, the beautiful, cruel trick of a damaged brain. I had everything, and now I have nothing. Less than nothing, because it was never real. There was no great love story, no epic, timeless romance between me and Blair. There’s only me, shattered and alone and clutching these fragments of a life I never lived and a love I never had. He’s gone, and he was never mine to lose.

There are no palm trees here.

I want the burn that blanks the edges and the dead space after. All I have to do is lean into the fall. God knows I’ve done it before. No one here will care. No one will stop me.

What do I do when both roads end in a loss? What do I hold when you take away the only jersey I’ve ever wanted and the only man I’ve ever loved, even when the knowing came out of nowhere?

But I am stuck to this chair, watching a man who doesn’t see me. I can’t stop loving him, even this fractured version of him that shares a face with the man I remember.

I am not going to be Blair’s second October. Practice starts in twenty minutes.

He is coming back. For us. For the game. It is the quietest, bravest thing I have ever seen. I will be his shield. I will be his legs. I will anticipate every pass, block every shot, and clear his path so all he has to do is skate. I will pour every ounce of my energy into the space around him. Tonight, I play for him.

I let myself breathe it in, the knowledge that I did one thing right tonight for him; It’s the first deep breath after a long skate. I carried a piece of his burden for one shift, one shot, one heartbeat.

I should be moving, too, should be showering, but I don’t want to yet. When I leave this moment behind, it becomes memory, and memories have proven unreliable in my life.

He’s carrying something heavy and he won’t set it down. The more he holds it, the more he hardens around it. I want to be the place he exhales.

And even in the stillness, and even when he gives me nothing, I am rewritten by him.

“Didn’t know you were watching.” “I’m always watching.” His eyes are on mine when he says it, and they linger a second too long before he skates away.

His reflected form shifts; my own is barely there. He is solid. Even as a mirage on the glass, he’s more real than I am.

It’s always at the margins where I feel the agony the sharpest. The almost. The nearly. The fragments of who we were.

“Show me what you do when you stop being afraid.”

“You play differently now,” he says. “Different good or different bad?” He takes another sip. “Different interesting.” “I didn’t think anyone noticed.” The music thrums around us, but we exist in our own pocket of quiet. His eyes drift over my face. “I’m not anyone.”