On bad days, they struck mid-performance. Mid-layback spin. Mid-twizzle. The world lurching violently sideways while my body was rotating on a single blade at competition speed, and the only barrier between me and a repeat of the worst forty-five seconds of my life was raw, feral instinct screaminghold the center, ride the edge, do NOT fall.
Blood sugar. It’s probably just low blood sugar.
I didn’t have diabetes. Not clinically, not by any metric the endocrinologist had measured during the battery of post-injury evaluations. But the relationship between my body and glucose had become a fraught, unreliable thing in the aftermath—months of stress hormones flooding my system, altered eating patterns during rehabilitation, the kind of chronic cortisol elevation that essentially rewired a metabolism and then didn’t bother leaving a manual for the new configuration.
When the dizziness struck, low blood sugar was typically the most benign explanation on the table, and I reached for benign explanations the way a climber reaches for the nearest handhold: fast, desperate, without questioning whether it would bear the weight.
I fumbled for the granola bar stashed in my jacket pocket—draped over the far end of the bench—and ate it in small, deliberate bites. Dark chocolate and sea salt. The sweetness dissolved on my tongue, slow and grounding, and I willed the glucose into my bloodstream with the intensity of someone performing a ritual rather than a snack.
Gradually, incrementally, the vertigo eased. Not vanished—never fully vanished—but retreated. Slunk back to the periphery of my awareness, where it curled up in a dark corner and waited with the patience of a predator that knew the next meal was only a matter of time.
I lay back along the length of the bench, my spine settling against the narrow wooden slats, and stared at the ceiling.
The rafters of Rink Four were industrial and unromantic. Exposed steel I-beams. Aluminum ventilation shafts. A lattice of copper piping that carried refrigerant to the cooling system embedded beneath the concrete slab.Functional, graceless, utilitarian to a fault—nothing like the soaring vaulted ceilings of the Maple Leaf Arena, where the architectural firm had spent a small fortune making the overhead lights mimic the aurora borealis and the acoustics transformed every collective gasp into a cathedral echo.
Don’t.
But the vertigo had pried the lock. Jimmied the deadbolt on the door I kept sealed with chains and stubbornness and the sheer, exhausting expenditure of refusing to look over my shoulder. When the world spun, my mind spun with it—dragging me backward, always backward, to that rotation. The one that never completed. The launch that had started with his hands on my waist and ended with my blood freezing into the ice and the silence of a stadium holding its breath while my future bled out at center rink.
I closed my eyes.
Mistake. Enormous, predictable mistake.
Because behind my eyelids, the past was not a memory. It was a location. And I’d just walked through the door.
The fragments arrived the way they always did—not as a narrative but as a sensory ambush. The wet, visceralpopof my knee dislocating. The metallic taste of blood where my teeth had punctured the inside of my lip. The cold—not the familiar, partnered cold of training, but the antagonistic, clinical cold of a surface that had been beneath my blades for twenty years and had never once warned me that it could also be a weapon. The referee’s whistle, shrill and final. The percussion of the medical gate slamming open. Gloved hands, too many gloved hands, strapping me to a board while the announcer narrated the death of my career with the polished solemnity of a man reading a teleprompter.
And the spinning. Always the spinning. The worldorbiting a fixed axis of pain—the same rotation happening now behind my sealed eyelids, the vertigo and the memory feeding each other in a loop I couldn’t break. How easy it was to drown in that current. How effortless, how seductive, how terrifyingly natural it felt to let the sensation pull you under and hold you there in the dark water of the worst day of your life.
The panichad arrived first. Primal. Animal. The full-body, fight-or-flight detonation of a nervous system registering catastrophic structural failure. Nothing cerebral about it—no calculation, no strategy, no coherent thought beyond the blinding, electric awareness thatI am broken and I cannot get up and everyone is watching.
The fearhad followed. Quieter. More insidious. Less a scream than a whisper repeating on a loop:Will I skate again? Will the joint hold weight? Will my body remember how to fly, or will it flinch every time a partner’s hands grip my waist, every time the ice rushes upward from below, every time?—
The anger.
God.
The anger.
That had been the last to arrive and the longest to leave. Longer than the knee’s healing. Longer than the nine months of physical therapy, the graduated progression from crutches to brace to the first tentative, flat-footed steps on rubber matting before my blade was permitted to touch frozen water again. The rage had been a fracture of its own—not in the cartilage or the ligaments but in the foundation of who I understood myself to be. A structural failure no surgeon could repair and no rehabilitation timeline could predict.
It wasn’t the motivational kind. Not the fuel that coaches bottled and sold. It was the kind that turned your hands intofists at three in the morning. The kind that bolted you upright in a hospital bed with your pulse hammering and your jaw clenched so tight your molars ached, and the only thought—the only single, all-consuming, incandescent thought—was the desire todestroy. To take every fragile, breakable, reachable object within arm’s length and reduce it to rubble, because the person who actually deserved the destruction was walking free. Unpunished. Unchallenged. Standing on the same ice that had swallowed my blood, absorbing the sympathy of a public that had watched him smile and chosen not to see it.
Breathe.
I pressed my palms flat against the bench. Fingers spread. Wood grain biting into the pads of my fingers. The countdown—backward from ten, measured, deliberate—the way the therapist at the rehabilitation center had taught me during those suffocating hours after midnight when the hospital walls compressed and the silence became its own species of violence.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
The ceiling stabilized overhead. The steel beams stopped swimming.
Seven. Six. Five.
My heart rate responded. The frantic, skittering pulse eased by degrees, finding its footing the way a skater finds the clean edge after a shaky entry—tentatively, and then with growing conviction.
Four. Three. Two.
The ice hummed beneath the boards. The fluorescents droned. The air tasted like minerals and quiet.
