Page 114 of Chasing Gold, Catching Her

Silence.

It was too quiet.

The screen was frozen. The call had dropped, there was no signal again.

“Tora…”

Her voice came out barely above a whisper.

Alisa sat back down anyway, wrapping her hands around the warm cup, and began to eat her dinner slowly in silence.

Tonight, that was all she wanted.

* * *

A couple of weeks later, the internal Olympic selection competition arrived, and at that moment Alisa was, objectively speaking, somewhere at the bottom of the singles ranking, after all, she had only performed internationally as a single skater once, in Beijing, for those additional quotas… but she was still in the running. There was still a chance.

And that “chance” was exactly what made everything worse.

Alisa was worried, really worried.

She woke up that morning already anxious, her sleep broken and shallow, constantly interrupted by flashes of knee pain that dragged her out of rest again and again—how completely fucked up was that?—and she could already tell it would affect her performance today, her head felt heavy, foggy, like she was thinking under the water.

She clenched her teeth against another pulse of pain and, for a second, genuinely considered throwing her phone against the wall. She didn’t want to go anywhere today. At all.

The apartment was freezing. Cold in that damp, unpleasant way that crept under the skin. Alisa curled tighter under the blanket, pulling it up to her chin as her whole body shivered, the alarm screaming at her from somewhere nearby, 6 a.m.

She lay there for a moment, staring into nothing, debating something stupid and simple: syrniki from the fridge… or just a banana on the way, quick and effortless?

The syrniki won.

With an irritated growl, she threw the blanket off, turned off the alarm, and forced herself out of bed, immediately slipping her feet into oversized dragon slippers. She grabbed a warm sweatshirt that nearly reached her knees and dragged herself into the kitchen, still half-asleep.

Her tablet was, as always, waiting on the kitchen table, it was her usual place for training replays, random shows, anything to fill the silence. She tapped it on, and when she saw there was internet connection, she perked up instantly, almost too quickly, opening her messages.

Nothing from Tora.

Should I text her?

Will she even answer?

Is she asleep… or already on her way to the rink?

Alisa grabbed her phone anyway. While the kettle heated and the syrniki slowly warmed in the microwave, she typed:

Alisa: Hi Tora, i miss you… today we have internal qualifiers for the olympics, they’ll decide who goes from our national team… i don’t know what my chances are, but i need to land everything. My knees are still being assholes, i’m basically at war with my own body.

No reply. Probably training already or on the way.

Alisa stared at the “delivered” status for a second, then sighed, well, at least it went through, and switched on a lecture about black holes.

Lately, she had been strangely obsessed with space even more than usual. Any free moment, she filled with lectures, videos, anything. It calmed her in a way nothing else did. Something about the scale of it all… how enormous the universe was, how insignificant she was in comparison.

The world didn’t revolve around her.

It revolved around black holes, galaxies, things that swallowed entire stars without noticing.

Somehow, that thought made everything quieter.