Skater down

She trusted me, and I let her down. I let her down hard.

The chemistry was there, the momentum flowing. Then something happened. Something terrible.

I failed, and I don't know how. She was up, and then she was down. She was down hard. unresponsive and twitching. Laying there a mere body's length away. She felt a rink away and yet close enough to tough. The moments it took to rise and go to her prone figure are etched in my memory like days on a desert island. I never felt so cold, so paralysed as I attempted to touch her, to hold her head, to search for her breath.

Her name would not wake her. I looked up to the crowd staring agape, to our coach growing slowly larger.

...

I wanted to die. She was alive but injured. I could have killed her. She trusted me. Her head bounced on the ice in my memory. Again and again. I winced down to my stomach, through my bowels. Time wouldn't reverse. My balance wouldn't recover.

I couldn't find a crack in the ice to blame, a distraction in the crowd, a defect in equipment.

The tape wouldn't reveal any secrets either. The end should have been as flawless as the beginning. As practiced, as performed.

In my dreams I cannot reach her. I am stuck to the ice. Frozen on my side. She doesn't move, she doesn't twitch. One eye opens to look at me and ask why.

I cannot answer. I had no intention, I swear. I trained, we practiced, endlessly. No soothsayer warned of this. It was not in the stars.

...

"It's okay," she said. It's not okay. Things were okay before. Things were more than okay before. But now the fortune is flipped cruely.

"It's okay," she said again. "I knew the risk. I don't regret taking it."

"I do," I said. "I hurt you. I could have killed you."

"Such is trust," she said.

Trust is a trickster, a trap, I think. Trust is the devil.

"Trust gave me wings," she said. "And I flew." A white bandage shrowded her head still. She took my cold hand and brought it to her temple. "I want to fly again." Her eyes wouldn't release mine. I stared into the red veins reminding of the side of impact. "Be my wings."