The Rest of the Story

by Tal Bauer

Instead, I opened my big mouth and asked, “Who’s hungry?” They looked at me like seagulls who’d just eyeballed kindergarteners with unguarded sandwiches.

I’d have bet my Stanley Cup ring he would have flashed those bright blues and said “yes.”

Moments. Choices. Was this the same? No, not by light-years. Except in all the echoes of how it was. Who do you stand up for when the gas meets the flame?

We found each other’s gaps and broken spaces and filled them in, and we came together like a kaleidoscope forming shimmering fractals out of piles of nothing. Every time you looked at us, we were different.

“The most important day in hockey is tomorrow. Tomorrow, you tackle what went wrong today. Tomorrow, you improve. Every day, every tomorrow, you get better.” Was I getting through? I couldn’t tell through the sweat-stained wreckage. But if I got them believing in tomorrow, they would spend their entire lives reaching for their futures. “Everything you need is already inside of you. You know where we need to be, and when we get home, we bring our game up. So let’s get going. We’ve got work to do tomorrow.” Finally, they smiled.

I circled back to where I started. “What do I do with the puck? That’s up to you. So what do you do? Cycle low or high, make space or drag defenders, head for open ice, or come in close? How do you decide? By knowing me and what I’m going to do, every time I get this puck.” I dug the dry erase marker into the fleshy center of my palm. “When you know your teammates like that—when you know them so well you know the decisions they’re going to make before they make them—you play in the future. You’re not reacting to the game; you’re defining it. You’re playing ahead of my play, and ahead of the next one. That’s how you dominate.”

We’d already closed the door on that future. I had, he had. Leaves were flipped. That boat was gone, the train had left, and the drawbridge was up. I’d said no, he’d walked away, and then he’d come back with his shit ordered. All his ducks were in a row. Mine were fucking feral and squawking in my mental pond, and what I was clinging to, what I was desperately clinging to, was the careful distance he was keeping.

I’d said no, he’d walked away, and then he’d come back with his shit ordered. All his ducks were in a row. Mine were fucking feral and squawking in my mental pond,

Fuck, it was terrifying. Fireworks in the veins, who-needs-sleep, I’ll-live-forever-on-these-butterflies-and-your-smile.

“Really. Right when I took your helmet in the tunnel and you first told me your name. Ever since then—” I shrugged. Every day since that one had been a tumble, a long and rocky bounce from the summit of my dim-witted stubbornness. We were here because of Shea’s grace, and because I wanted, to the knurls of my marrow, to become the man that Shea saw whenever he looked at me. That man seemed like somebody special, and I wanted to stretch myself out to fill in the shape of him. To be him for Shea.

God, he was beautiful, like fine art given a heartbeat and let loose on the world.

My philosophy is, the more you try and push something away, the greater control it has over you. Pushing something away gives it power, and power sows the seeds of terror. So when you’re clenching around something awful, and when you’re holding on and holding on, trying desperately not think about the past or what happened, all of your pain magnifies, and that’s when both terror and shame are given free rein to grow. Eventually, that terror, and the shame, and the pain, all feel like they’re strangling you. But when you confront that terror, and when you turn around and say to the pain that you’re not afraid any longer, you begin to break the stranglehold that all that darkness has over you. Talking is the first step of that journey.

“You know, when you’re a younger man, and bad things happen to someone you love, you think you need to go out and slay the monster that’s crashed into their life. You think you need to drag the carcass back home and show it off, prove you’ve vanquished that evil. As you get older, you realize… Most times, that’s not really what someone needs from you. Most people don’t want the action hero. What they need, more than anything, is for you to be there.”

It’s a big thing to recognize inside yourself that there are lines you will not cross, and that even if someone can push you hard up to the edge, you won’t go over.