Three names, no send

Three names in the notebook and I keep adding nothing. Just staring at them until the rice goes cold. One of them is a swimmer I used to train beside at the institute — haven't written to him in three years, maybe longer. One is someone I owe an apology to and I keep rewriting the first line in my head. The third I don't want to write down but it's the truest one: the kid I was at twenty-two, the one who couldn't get out of bed for a month after the pool shut.

Voss's sponsor pulled overnight and my name went to the top of the Caulfield poster. Danny said seal the corner and I said yeah like it was nothing. It wasn't nothing. I watched Lachie post that clip of Voss on the pads and the first thing I felt was relief. Then something colder. Then I felt like shit for feeling relieved. Somewhere tonight there's a phone held at the right angle that could show my shoulder hitch too, and I know what a clip like that does to a man.

Zoe's name is sitting in a draft I haven't sent. Three months of opening the thread, writing the first line, closing the phone. She doesn't know about the Voss thing. She doesn't know I'm top-billed. She just knows I went quiet again.

The shoulder is humming low, the old hum. Brayden Cotton tomorrow at Apex — he bumps hard and I need to not swing first. I need to be smarter than the kid in the clip. I keep telling myself this is what I rebuilt for. But the second life is the one where I have to watch other men fall to find my footing, and I don't know what to do with that except stare at three names on a page.