Chapter Text
"I tried to do my best
I ran, only looking straight ahead
But I tripped and fell and ended up falling behind
Why does this only happen to me right before tears came to my eyes
You were crying next to me"
I don’t even remember when the pain began.
It wasn’t a snap. Not some cinematic crack that warned me of danger. It was quiet. Subtle. The kind of ache that became routine—like brushing your teeth or tying your shoelaces. You get used to it. You ignore it. You adapt.
But now, in this cold, suspended darkness I’m floating in—where sound doesn’t echo and time doesn’t tick—I remember.
I remember when the pain began.
It was long before the tournament. Long before high school. Before the aching shoulder and the ice packs. Before the tape. The hospitals. The warnings.
I was a kid.
Just a kid with too much heart in too small a body.
I used to sneak out of my room at night, crawling on hands and knees like a spy past my parents’ bedroom just to sit in front of the TV. My grandfather had a collection of DVDs—grainy old baseball matches from before I was even born. He’d let me hold them, clean them with his special cloth. Said I was the only one allowed to touch them because I “respected the sport.”
Our living room had a separate TV. We were lucky that way. Not rich, not showy—just fortunate. And in that tiny living room, curled beneath an old fleece blanket, I watched heroes soar. Men in white and gray uniforms that never gave up. Players who could throw a ball across the field like it was fate itself they were hurling. I watched them and I believed. With my whole heart, I believed I could be one of them.
My room was filled with baseball posters, tacked onto walls that had been repainted too many times. My grandfather’s real baseball—scuffed and brown, kissed by time—sat on my nightstand like a holy relic. I had a glove too. My parents bought it for my birthday that year, even though it was more than they could afford. And then, of course, there was the cap. A signed cap from my favorite player, gifted by my grandfather before he died.
I loved baseball the most.
And for a time, it loved me back.
Until it didn’t.
Until that day.
I remember the hum of the car. The backseat window cool against my cheek. My legs swinging slightly as I hugged my new glove. The match had ended hours ago, but I still felt like I was inside the stadium, the noise of the crowd still pulsing in my blood.
“I’ll be like them one day,” I told myself. “I’ll play in a stadium like that. I’ll make grandpa proud.”
And then—
Screech.
Crash.
Metal grinding into metal. Shattered glass. A sound I never forgot because it took so much from me.
The impact came on my side. The right. My shoulder took it full force.
And just like that, everything turned black.
That was the beginning.
I woke up in the hospital days later. Tubes in my arm. My shoulder wrapped like it was made of glass. My parents were there. My mother’s face pale and swollen from crying. My father gripping my hand like he could hold me in the world with force alone.
The doctor’s voice was the only thing I heard clearly that day.
“No strenuous activity for the foreseeable future. No sports. Especially not baseball.”
Especially not baseball.
It was the first time I ever felt hatred. Not towards the doctor. Not even toward the other driver.
Toward fate.
Toward life.
Toward this cruel joke that I had been handed.
I should’ve stopped. I could’ve listened. But I didn’t.
Because I wasn’t ready to give up. I couldn’t.
So I defied them.
All of them.
I went to games in secret. Threw balls in abandoned lots. Practiced in the dark until my shoulder screamed. And when I got caught, when my mother begged me with tears in her eyes to stop—I turned away.
I became someone else. Not her son. Not that frail boy from the backseat of a ruined car.
I ran.
Changed my school. Changed how I talked. How I moved. I buried the past in a shallow grave and told myself it never existed.
In my new life, I was the boy who never lost. Who pitched clean. Who aimed straight and never faltered. I became what I needed to be:
The perfect player. The unstoppable force. The hopeful lie.
And I clung to that lie for years.
Every ache I ignored. Every night I iced my shoulder with silent screams in my throat. Every moment of pain—I told myself it was worth it. That the dream was louder than the suffering.
Until today.
Until the stadium roared for me.
Until I stood on the mound like a hero with a dying shoulder, pitching as if I wasn’t already breaking.
Until I gave that final throw… and felt something snap.
The silence after was deafening.
Not in the stadium. Not in the world.
In me.
Because that was the moment I knew.
The debt had come. The years I borrowed from my own body had run out. The pain I denied was no longer asking—it was taking.
And I laughed.
Here in this void, where the darkness swallows me whole, I laugh at myself.
Because the truth always catches up eventually.
It doesn’t care about your dream.
It doesn’t care that you bled for it.
It only comes to collect.
And today, it finally did.
It took from me the thing I loved most.
And I don’t know if I have anything left to give.