The writing is professional. The person writing it is in the process of making the biggest decision of his career, and the process is not urgent because the process requires time and the time is available and the decision, when it comes, will be irreversible.
I owe the journalism everything. I owe it honesty.
I owe Jamie honesty too.
The two debts are approaching collision, and the collision, when it arrives, will determine which version of Declan Osei walks away.
JAMIE
Wes Chen appears at my stall on a Thursday morning holding a paper bag.
This is not metaphorical. He is physically standing in front of my stall, at 6:45 AM, before the locker room has filled, holding a brown paper bag that smells like something warm and extraordinary. His face is doing the Wes Chen neutral expression, which is the expression of a man whose emotional register is buried so deep that reading it requires excavation tools.
"Eat it," he says. "Don't ask questions."
He places the bag on my shelf and walks away. The entire interaction lasts four seconds. In four seconds, Wes Chen has delivered a sentence, a bag, and a directive, and has departed without waiting for acknowledgment because Wes Chen does not require acknowledgment. Wes Chen operates on a communication frequency that is below the threshold of most human conversation, and the frequency is sufficient.
I open the bag. Inside is a loaf of bread. Sourdough. Still warm. The crust is dark and crackled and the weight of it in my hands is substantial, the dense, satisfying heft of a loaf that was made by someone who understands that bread is not a product.Bread is a process. Bread is time and attention and patience converted into something you can hold.
I tear off a piece. The interior is open-crumbed and tangy and soft, and the crust shatters and the crumb gives and the flavor is layered in a way that suggests the starter has been alive for years, developing complexity through daily feedings and nightly rests, and the person who made this bread cares about it in a way that goes beyond cooking.
I eat three pieces before anyone else arrives. The bread is the best thing I've eaten since I moved to Atlanta. The bread is the best thing I've eaten possibly ever, and I grew up with my mother's kitchen, which is not a low bar. I fold the bag closed and put it in my stall and go to morning skate and the bread sits on my shelf like a small, warm monument to a conversation I don't yet understand.
After practice, Wes finds me again.
He's in the equipment room. The equipment room is where Luca works, but Luca is on the ice doing post-practice gear checks, and the room is empty except for Wes and the racks of skates and the smell of leather and tape. Wes is sitting on a folding chair near the sharpening station. He looks like he's been waiting.
"You ate the bread," he says. Not a question.
"I ate the bread. It was incredible."
"Sit down."
I sit. The folding chair across from him is the kind of chair that exists in every equipment room in every rink in every city, metal and uncomfortable and designed by someone who did not prioritize human comfort. I sit in it and Wes looks at me and the look is not the neutral expression. The look is something else. The look is the face of a man who has decided to say something and who is marshaling the words the way he used to marshal his fists: deliberately, with full awareness of the damage they can do.
"I bake bread," he says. "This is a thing about me that the team knows. What the team doesn't know, or didn't know until Luca, is why."
He pauses. The pause is not hesitation. The pause is structural. Wes Chen's pauses are load-bearing.
"I bake because my hands shake after fights. I used to fight. That was my job. I hit people and they hit me and then I sat in the penalty box and then I went home and my hands shook and I stood in my kitchen at 2 AM and I kneaded dough because the kneading was the only thing I found that made the shaking stop."
His hands are in his lap. I look at them. The knuckles are scarred and misshapen, the fingers slightly crooked from breaks that healed without proper alignment. These are the hands of a man who spent years converting violence into a paycheck and who converted the aftermath into bread.
"I carried that alone for a long time," he says. "The shaking. The baking. The fact that the thing I was paid to do was destroying me. I carried it alone because carrying it alone felt like strength. I was the enforcer. I was tough. Tough guys don't ask for help. Tough guys don't sit in kitchens at 2 AM with flour on their hands and tears on their face wondering how long they can keep doing this before the doing breaks them."
He looks at me. The look is direct and unguarded and carrying a weight that I can feel physically, the gravity of a man who has been where I am and who is choosing, at cost to himself, to say so.
"I'm not saying your thing is my thing," he says. "I don't know what your thing is. I haven't asked and I'm not going to ask because it's not mine to ask. But I know the alone part. Whatever the thing is, the alone part is always the same. The alone part is carrying something by yourself and believing the carrying iscourage when the carrying is actually the thing that's killing you."
The sentence lands in my chest like a fist. Not a violent fist. A precise one. The fist of a man who knows exactly where to hit because he's been hit in the same place.
The alone part is what kills you.
I am alone. I have been alone since before I had the name for what I was alone with. Alone in Duluth with a feeling I wouldn't name. Alone in the draft process with a smile I wore like a uniform. Alone at the bar with a Sprite and a roster of couples. Alone in Philadelphia with a search bar and a ceiling. Alone in a celebration pile where my body told the truth and I pulled away because the truth was the thing I was alone with.
The alone part. The alone part. The alone part is the wall I built and the monosyllables I hide behind and the floor-watching and the checkpoint and the cursor I close and the history I delete. The alone part is the architecture of my life, and Wes Chen just identified it in a sentence and the sentence is the truest thing anyone has said to me since Mik said the walls were optional.
"I don't know how to stop," I say. My voice is not steady. The unsteadiness is the first crack in the wall that I've produced out loud, in the presence of another person, in daylight.