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***sköldpaddor*** · 05-25-2021, 09:09 AM

(we are doing narrative now folks, some things don't work as a blog entry. also obligatory disclaimer that you should not do what Gunnar is doing! take your health seriously! don't play through injuries! don't be a dumb hockey boy!)

The longest hockey game of Gunnar’s life takes place shortly before his thirty-first birthday, in the second round of the playoffs against the Calgary Dragons. Two full games of hockey, plus an additional portion of a fourth OT period. And Gunnar isn’t out of shape by any stretch of the imagination, but by the end of the second OT, he’s feeling a little like he got run over by a train. Somehow, maybe on pure adrenaline alone, he survives a third period of overtime, and the game is still not done.

He has the puck along the boards, and there’s a blur of black and red out of the corner of his eye that tells him he has a split second to make a decision. He banks the puck along to Shep, and just as he does, the hit comes. It’s not remotely a dirty hit, or even especially hard, just a hockey hit, but he catches an edge in an awkward way when he comes down, and somewhere in his knee, something pops. He doesn’t notice pain, not immediately; maybe it’s the adrenaline, the pressure of the game, but he’s so exhausted that he’s not even worried until long after the game is lost, when he’s standing in the shower and he notices that the knee, his left, seems a little swollen.

It still doesn’t hurt…or at least, not any more than the rest of him does after playing nearly seven periods of hockey, but Gunnar has been around hockey his entire life; he knows what’s out there in the world of injuries. There is a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach when he’s sitting at his stall afterwards, dressed in his street clothes, hair still damp from the shower, staring down at his knee almost as if it’s betrayed him. He lays one hand on it, and bites his lip hard. The skin is warm - warmer than the other knee even though they’ve both had the same amount of time to cool down from the heat of the shower.

Gunnar does not have a history of making poor decisions when it comes to his health. He’s usually smart about this stuff; he gets things checked out when he has the slightest inkling that something might be wrong, he talks a lot about how hockey needs to get past this macho-man culture of playing through injuries, all of that. But here he is, fighting an inner battle over what he knows he should do and the only thing he feels like he can do. He should go to the trainers, tell them what happened, what he’s worried about, and have somebody check it out. That would be the smart thing to do. But Gunnar has spent a lot of time lately thinking about how quickly the years have rushed by, about how many years he may possibly have left in him to do this. And the idea of being told that he can’t play in these playoffs…that’s a thought that spirals out of control pretty quickly in his mind. It’s not that he wants to play through an injury to prove he’s tough, it’s that he’s acutely aware that at this point in his career, every trip to the playoffs is more likely to be his last shot at this.

He wears a better brace and he goes out and notches a goal and two assists in the game three win, and for the time being, he feels like he’s made the right decision. His knee definitely doesn’t feel worse after the game, but he’s also very conscious of the fact that this is only the second round of the playoffs - if things go the way they’re all hoping they will, they’ll have two more rounds of this. At least ten more games, almost definitely more. He tells himself that if they can make it past Calgary, then he’ll go talk to the trainers.

It feels like he’s hiding some dark secret. He knows he’s being the worst kind of hypocrite - after all the times he’s spoken out about this exact thing, all the times he has tried to tell other guys that there’s no shame in taking care of yourself, that nobody on any team worth being on will judge you for it, and now here he is, going completely against what he himself believes is the right thing to do because it’s not what he wants to do. And it wears on him - not physically, not immediately anyway, because the brace is helping, his knee still doesn’t really hurt all that much (again, not in comparison to all the other various bruises and aches that come at the end of a season) - but emotionally.

If Gunnar’s being honest, he’s been struggling a lot lately in that regard. He’s always been proud of his own ability to stay positive in challenging situations, to find the bright side in circumstances that aren’t ideal, and whether people expect that of him or not, he expects it of himself. Gunnar is the guy who makes sure he has a smile and something individually complimentary to say to every teammate he runs into. He’s proud of the way he’s grown into the role of veteran leader, the way he has redirected all the fire of his youth into the steady warmth of reliable if never league-leading production on the ice and in the locker room. But lately, he has really struggled to be still. There is an uneasiness in his heart, something more and more unsettled and restless the more time goes by.

It comes and goes, of course; he has good days and bad days. Sometimes he manages to turn the bad days into good ones, like he did last offseason, when the Syndicate missed the playoffs and he managed to find that elusive mental quietness somewhere in Toronto, throwing his energy and passion into other people’s hockey. And some days he just doesn’t. Can’t. Can’t pull himself out of the increasingly magnetic spiral of doubt in the back of his mind telling him that he doesn’t deserve this, that he hasn't earned it, that he hasn't earned any good thing that's ever happened to him, that he's just gotten lucky.

The playoffs are especially isolating. He stays close to his team, because when it gets to this point in the year, it feels like all the other walls start to close in. The friends he has on other teams seem very far away, and Gunnar doesn’t really blame them. They’re either on teams that are fierce rivals of his own, or they’re fighting their own playoff battles, or, maybe worst of all, they’re in the same spot Gunnar found himself last season - on the outside of the postseason despite playing an entire season of damned good hockey. And Gunnar isn’t naive enough to imagine that everybody copes with these things in the same strange ways he does, it’s not as if he expected every one of his friends to show up in Syndicate jerseys the moment their own teams were eliminated for the year, but it is such a sharp contrast to the way he was feeling last year at this time that he can’t help dwelling on it a little.

Last offseason was about making peace with a lost season of hockey. This season feels like trying to play hockey while holding the pieces together of a phase of his life he is coming to understand is rapidly drawing to a close, and doing it with essentially not a single person around him who fully understands what his brain is putting him through.

They win game four, and the series is at 3-1 in Chicago’s favor. Gunnar doesn’t really do much; he takes a stupid tripping penalty and that’s about it, but they get the win anyway. Thankfully, having an uneventful game also means the media mostly leave him alone afterwards, and he’s able to shower, change, and make his way home without any difficulty. They have to fly back to Calgary the next day, but Gunnar goes home to his own place that night, climbs into bed and lets his dogs curl up close, and he tries to empty his mind.

He’s relatively certain he’s done something to his ACL, there’s really not much sense in denying that to himself, even if he’s keeping it from everyone else. He doesn’t know if it’s the kind of thing that will need surgery, but at the very least, it’ll need some rest before worlds. His contract is up after this season. There’s expansion to think about. There’s his growing leadership role with the Swedish national team, the people who are looking up to him there. There’s the kids on his youth team back at home, several of whom are just a season or two away from draft eligibility and being ready to make the move to North America to play.

Gunnar stares at his phone that night for hours. He desperately needs to talk to someone, tell someone what he’s worried about, how fucking terrified he is of what’s going to happen this next offseason regardless of how far they go in the playoffs. He types out a text, hey, can we find time to talk tomorrow? and he pastes it into messages to about seven different teammates without actually sending it. He feels like somebody should know what’s going on with him. His first instinct is to tell Corey, because Corey is generally the first person he comes to with things he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to about (like ”hey, Noah and I broke up, is there any chance you want to get drunk tonight” or ”hey it’s me, I think I just got traded to your team and I feel like I can’t breathe”) - but in this case he’s all but certain Corey would grab him by the ear and physically drag him to see the trainers immediately. There are two or three other names in his phone he would normally go to, but they’re people he hasn’t talked to since the playoffs started and doesn’t expect to hear from until they’re over. He thinks about Shep, but he knows Shep has a lot on his plate right now and he’s also not looking to inflict sleep deprivation on his whole line. His thumb hovers over Johnny Hamilton’s name just long enough for his brain to conjure up a vivid mental image of Johnny yelling at him to stop being an idiot or some other insult that Gunnar will never understand because he’s not sure if it’s Philadelphian or completely made up or both...and then he keeps scrolling.

Eventually, he finds someone to send the text to, then closes his eyes, centering himself in the darkness. They need to close this series out, he thinks. Just finish the series so they can have a couple of days off, or at least travel days, and he can find some room in his own mind to breathe. Maybe he’ll be able to get this...well, not all of it, he’s not expecting anybody to just listen to every one of his problems, but specifically the part about his knee, off his chest tomorrow. Even if it’s just one person, maybe he can start to work his way back from this island he keeps putting himself on.

He sets his phone aside, and he keeps his eyes closed until finally, he manages to sleep. It’s not good sleep, though, he sees just about every hour on the clock that night, and when he is asleep, he has strange dreams. In one of them, there is a deinonychus chewing on his leg, and he is waving people away from him who try to help, saying “no, no, it’s fine, it doesn’t even hurt.”

He wakes up in the morning absolutely dead tired, and trudges around, going about his usual going-out-of-town checklist, making sure everything the dogsitter needs is there for when she gets there later. Then he leaves for the airport, grabbing his overnight bag from beside the door. One day at a time, he tells himself. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time, one shift at a time.

DeletedAtUserRequest · 05-25-2021, 01:28 PM

Very nice read.

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roastpuff · 05-25-2021, 02:34 PM

ACL tears are no joke...

OOC: I hope that this is not a reflection of your current state of mind, and that you are doing better than Gunnar is currently. If you ever need to talk, feel free to give me a PM or Discord message.

***sköldpaddor*** · 05-25-2021, 02:42 PM

05-25-2021, 02:34 PMroastpuff Wrote: ACL tears are no joke...

OOC: I hope that this is not a reflection of your current state of mind, and that you are doing better than Gunnar is currently. If you ever need to talk, feel free to give me a PM or Discord message.