Chapter 47 The Journal
Noah POV
The physio clears him to walk without the brace for short distances on Wednesday.
This sounds like progress and in physical terms it is. In every other sense, the reduction of external restriction means there is less to focus on and more room for everything he has been successfully not thinking about while his knee gave him an excuse to lie still.
He sits on the bench in the training room after the session and stares at his hands.
The team is outside running a set play drill he designed. He can hear the coach's voice carrying across the field, the shouts of players, the particular rhythm of a session he is not in. He has watched enough practice from the sideline this week to know the team is fine without him on the field for an afternoon. That knowledge is both correct and painful in a specific way he does not have a word for.
He picks up his phone. There are no messages from Elias right now. They have been in their careful in-between space since Sunday, texting but not fully, present but not close. He understands it. He was the one who made it necessary.
He puts the phone down.
There is a notepad on the bench beside him. Tactical notes from last week, a play diagram in the corner, his own handwriting across the top of the page. He looks at it for a moment. Then he flips to a clean page.
He writes: I have never once said what I actually want.
He looks at the sentence for a long time.
He has kept a version of this since secondary school. Not a proper journal, not something with a cover and a lock, just whatever notepad is nearby when a thought gets too heavy to keep only in his head. His mum used to call it his spillover book. He has not thought about that in years.
He writes: I want to keep playing. More than almost anything. Not for the captaincy or the scouts or the future that everyone else has mapped out for me. For the thing that happens when I am on the field and the noise in my head goes quiet and the only thing that exists is the ball and the space and what I do with both.
He pauses. Writes: I have been using that as an excuse.
He crosses that out. Writes it again. Does not cross it out the second time.
The field outside is loud for a moment, a cheer from the team, someone scoring something in the drill. He listens to it and feels the pull in his chest that is always there, the love of the game that has never needed translation, that was there before everything else complicated itself around it.
He writes: Elias is not a complication.
He writes: I keep treating him like one.
He fills three pages before he realizes he has been sitting here for forty minutes.
He does not write anything beautiful. He does not write anything he would let anyone read. He writes the way you think when you are not trying to be coherent, just trying to follow the thread and see where it goes.
He writes about his dad. About the particular way his dad talks about sport as a language for everything else, as the acceptable container for all the things men in his family do not say directly. He writes about growing up learning to translate himself into that language. Learning to put pride and fear and love and longing all into the same vocabulary of the game.
He writes: I don't know who I am off the field.
Then: That's not true. I know exactly who I am. I'm just not sure I'm allowed to be him.
He stares at that sentence for a long time.
The training session outside winds down. He can hear the sounds of it ending, the cool-down, the voices dropping in volume.
He writes: I chose Elias every time I didn't walk away. I chose him every time I looked for him first in a room. I chose him every time I stayed quiet instead of saying the truth out loud.
Then: The difference now is that I want to choose him on purpose. Not by accident. Not in spite of everything. Because of everything.
He closes the notepad.
His knee aches with a low steady pulse that the physio says is normal for this stage of recovery. He puts both hands flat on his thighs and sits with it.
He does not text Elias right now. Not because he does not want to. Because some things need to be fully formed before they are spoken, and this one is not finished yet.
But it is closer.
He picks up the notepad one more time and writes one last line at the bottom of the page.
I am done being afraid of the most honest thing about me.
He puts the cap back on the pen.
Then he stands up carefully, tests his weight, and walks outside into the afternoon.