The walls are optional.
The walls are optional. This is the most terrifying sentence I have ever heard because it implies that the walls I have built (the monosyllables, the invisibility, the search bar that stays empty, the feeling that stays unnamed, the life that stays small) are not requirements. They are choices. And choices can be changed.
I'm not ready to change them. I'm not ready to pick up the words Mik left on the shelf or to walk through the opening that Gerald pointed to or to type the sentence that the cursor is waiting for.
But I heard it. The hearing comes first.
Through the windshield, the Atlanta afternoon is bright and warm and completely indifferent to the fact that a nineteen-year-old in the parking lot of a hockey facility is sitting in his car having the most important crisis of his life. Cars pass on the highway. Birds do whatever birds do. The world continues.
Gerald walks past the car on his security rounds. He sees me. He keeps walking. Gerald knows when to keep walking. Gerald, I am beginning to understand, knows everything.
I start the car. I drive home. The furnished apartment is still empty and still anonymous and the cursor still blinks in my mind and the walls are still up.
But they are optional.
The word "optional" is a door. I am not walking through it yet. But I can see it. For the first time in my life, I can see the door.
DECLAN
Priya Mehta is my oldest friend in Atlanta and the only person in my life who has zero interest in hockey.
This is her value. In a world where I spend twelve hours a day inside the sport (watching it, writing about it, thinking about it, dreaming about it on the nights when my brain refuses to shut off), Priya exists entirely outside it. She works in product management at a fintech company in Midtown. She considers sports "an elaborate form of socially acceptable tribalism." She once asked me why hockey players fight and, when I explained the enforcer's role, said, "So they pay a man to hit another man and then sit in a special box? That's just assault with a timeout."
We're at dinner. A Thai place on Buford Highway that she found through an algorithm that ranks restaurants by some metric I don't understand. The pad see ew is extraordinary. Priya is telling me about a product launch that went sideways and I'm listening in the way that good friends listen, which is with my face and not always with my brain, because my brain is elsewhere tonight.
"You're not here," she says.
"I'm here."
"Your body is here. Your mind is in the press box."
"I don't have a press box. I have a designated media seat."
"Your mind is in the designated media seat. What's going on?"
This is the thing about Priya. She studied psychology before switching to business, and the psychology never fully left. She reads people the way I read game film: with pattern recognition and an irritating refusal to accept the surface-level explanation.
I talk about the beat. The team, the culture piece, the feature on Cole and Mik that ran on Sunday. I talk about Sharon's feedback and the reader response and the freelance offers that have started coming in because of the visibility. I talk about all of this with genuine enthusiasm because all of it is genuinely good, and all of it is genuinely not the thing Priya is asking about.
"And the rookie?" she says.
"What about the rookie?"
"You've mentioned him three times in the last ten minutes."
I count backward. She's right. I mentioned Jamie's first goal (context: the team's offensive development), Jamie's skating speed (context: the draft analysis I'm working on), and Jamie's comment about the Volkov feature (context: the way the story is resonating with the team). Three mentions. All professionally defensible.
"He's the biggest story on the roster," I say. "Fourth overall pick, generational speed, nineteen years old. He's relevant to every piece I'm writing."
"You mentioned his smile."
I stop chewing. The pad see ew becomes very interesting, texturally, in my mouth.
"When?"
"Thirty seconds ago. You said, 'he finally smiled in the hallway the other night, a real one, not the media one.'Journalists don't report on smiles. Journalists report on goals and assists and, I don't know, penalty kills."
"Power plays."