Page 1 of The Fall

One

It’s a good place to disappear.

I park my truck at the far end of the beach and walk until the only footprints in the sand are mine, then collapse behind the dunes and sit with my knees drawn up and elbows braced against them, staring out at a black that has no beginning and no end. Minutes seep away, probably hours too.

It’s only me and the ocean; the horizon is lost. Ocean and sky have welded together into a single slab of darkness, and the world has lost its border.

Waves crash and churn and tumble in the black, curl, collapse, and swell again, raining whisper-thin salt on me.

The froth sneaks higher, flirting around my boots, hissing and slithering up the sand.

It’s not unusual for me to end up alone on this black beach with its dark waters and only my thoughts for company.

But tonight feels different.

Tonight feels like an ending.

I used to think hockey was everything worth having; only the ice, your skates, and the chase mattered. Chase the puck, chase the win. Chase that Cup. Win or die. Turn the want up so loud the rest of your life burns out. I ran toward that for sixteen years and never slowed down.

The ocean roars. Another wave shatters across the sand.

Once, my future was written in big, bold letters: Torey Kendrick, generational talent, drafted second overall.

But that was four years ago, and ever since, I’ve watched everyone else chase their dreams and spin them into pure and sparkling gold while mine have rotted and turned sour.

I had bones full of want but now I have nowhere to put that wanting anymore.

I hate it now, this game I’ve poured my life into.

I hate it. I hate what it took, and what it exposed.

I gave hockey everything, but all it has done is broken me and laughed at what spilled out.

I still dream in highlight reels, but now, all I see are the plays I fucked up.

I relive them at night. I relive them when I blink.

This isn’t how things were supposed to go.

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 close my eyes, let the roar of the waves fill up my head. What’s wrong with me?

Nothing, I want to say. Nothing’s wrong.

But something is , and it’s getting worse each day.

There’s something loose, something rattling. I tell myself it’s not a real break, but I feel it. I cannot find my missing pieces.

When I open my eyes, the ocean is a black mirror reflecting a cracked and starless sky.

The waves seem to split me and spin me and spread me thinner, thinner, thinner.

My thoughts are worn out to threads. Maybe if I close my eyes tight enough or hold my breath long enough or wish hard enough, then everything could change, or I could change.

I wish I could be the Torey everyone thought I was.

If I am who my team thought they were getting when they drafted me, then I should be able to turn this around.

Everyone has slides; not everyone craters.

Everyone who’s ever laced up skates knows what potential means and how it hangs around your neck.

But I’m pretty sure no one would miss me. The fans revile me. All they see is a washed-up has-been and a waste of salary. My coach can’t stand me. My teammates skirt me like a black hole, like all of my failure will get all over them and ruin their lives too.

And my dad?—

Every dad knows what you could be if you lived up to your potential. He texts after every game, three-paragraph dissections of my mistakes, wrapped in the language of “constructive criticism.” He used to say, “You get what you earn, kid.”

And I have.

I hate myself for being a failure. I hate not meeting my potential. I am the one who hasn’t done what I’m supposed to do; I am the one who has let my talent rot, fester, and die.

I should be better than this, but I don’t know how. How do you fix yourself when you don’t know what’s broken? How do you find your way when you’re so lost you don’t know which way is north?

Or worse—what if you’re not broken and this is just you, as good as you’ll ever get?

What if this is it?

When I’ve been here before on other maudlin midnights feeling sorry for myself, I’ve screamed at the waves or hurled rocks at the surf, and then I would trudge back to my life and lace up again in the morning.

I’ve never come to this beach when I’ve been this desolate before.

Tonight, the emptiness out there echoes the void inside me.

I need to get off this beach, walk back to my truck, and get away from these waves and their whispers.

But I don’t want to.

I’m not suicidal, but I’m desperate, and the difference is razor-thin. Here, hovering on the knife-edge between the two, I can’t say which way I’ll fall.

I haven’t slept in three days. Not really.

Every time I close my eyes, I see blown plays, missed blocks, and given-up goals.

It’s a constant movie flickering on the insides of my eyelids.

The headlines, the sound bites, and the frustrated growl of my coach are all around me, this constant barrage of everything I am not .

Every day, I’m drowning in all of it, in what I could have been, what I wish I could be, if only?—

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 .

Waves break and crash, flow and recede.

Everything I used to love about my life is either irreparably shattered or has withered and died.

I could do it.

The thought pops into my head so matter-of-factly.

I’ve been thinking about it for months. It started so fleeting, so minor, until I realized it wasn’t so fleeting anymore.

Now the thought is scratched into my brain, worried on over and over again, each time gouging me deeper, and it’s not going away.

Would anyone notice?

Hey, what happened to Kicks?

Who knows, man. Kid was a washout anyway.

No, no one would miss me if I disappeared.

It’s only one step, then another. The water and the sky are so entwined that I cannot separate the two.

For one beautiful moment, I believe that I’m not stuck in this life, and that if I jumped, I could soar. If I ran, I could flee. I could let go and find a new life.

The roar of the waves fills my ears. Black water crashes around me. My knees give way, and I drop to the surf. Wave and sea foam slap my face, cruel with salt, harsh on my lips.

I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to turn around. I’d rather stay here. I’d rather merge with the waves that stretch to the horizon and crash and curl and slide and pull back.

But I get up.

No one is coming to save me from myself.

The rubber flooring of the Orcas locker room squeaks under my shoes as I trudge toward my stall. I stop and stare at my name tag. There I am, Torey Kendrick, the disappointment.

I drop my bag and sink onto the bench.

There was a time when my name meant something, when I was the golden boy, the second overall pick, the franchise savior who would lead this team to glory. Everyone believed it, too: scouts, management, fans. Hell, even I believed it.

The name over my stall might as well be a punchline now.

I peel the tape off my stick, strip by strip. Clean lines used to calm me. Ritual equals control. Left glove, right glove. Laces tight, then tighter. The bite of the eyelets grounds me.

They said my stride was poetry once. They said I saw lanes two passes ahead, that the game slowed for me. I fix my gaze on the black tape pulling smooth from the roll, a single mercy. Around the knob, spiral, pinch, test.

Dreams die in slow, rotting stages. First it’s a blip, a bad week, a cold stick.

Then comes the bargaining—one more video session, one more hour on the bike, one more tweak to my curve.

After that, the slow, grinding acceptance seeps in, suffocating you, until the life you pictured wavers like heat over asphalt: right there, shimmering, so close, and nothing but air.

Hockey has a way of folding you into its myth and spitting you out when you don’t fit the story anymore. Billboards come down. Jerseys go on clearance racks. The kid who used to shout my name when I tossed him a puck at warm-ups probably shouts someone else’s now.

I close my eyes. The room keeps going without me.

I try to picture the first goal I’ll make, the right read off the draw, the snap through the slot, but my brain feeds me static. Some dark current runs crosswise through me, an undertow whispering let go. Let it all go. Watch your life sink and save yourself the swim.