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Hunger was simple, it belonged to people who asked for food and accepted it, but to him it was something else, it began somewhere anatomy couldn’t name, heavier every minute until it became impossible to tell whether it lived inside his stomach or his head. His skin felt too tight, his clothes too heavy, but every few minutes he found himself standing, walking toward the kitchen, catching himself halfway down the hallway, forcing his feet back into the living room. He wanted to blame silence but the house wasn’t silent, upstairs his father was moving furniture around, and he could hear the washing machine through the walls. It was a warm home, he was happy to be there, kinda, perhaps there was just too much room to remember what routine had felt like for his last two months. His phone remained face down on the coffee table, he hadn’t touched it in hours, he wasn’t expecting texts anyway, which of course made it worse. Sad. He tried distracting himself the way he always did, he calculated tomorrow’s workout, mentally rearranged every meal he had planned for the week, counted protein without opening the nutrition app, started over when he lost count. He felt hunger, but he wasn’t hungry. The macros, the steps he hadn’t walked, how many kilometres he would have to run, how much longer until the feeling disappeared, but he wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t, he had eaten, he knew exactly what lived inside his body. Then why did it feel like something inside him was clawing at the walls? He stood, sat back down, stood again and his heart was beating so loudly it drowned out the television, he kept repeating that word to himself, don’t, don’t, but took one step, then another, don’t, but he opened the pantry before realizing, and the wrapper stared back at him, brown, gold, ridiculous. His fingers hovered above it forever, the plastic crackled and fuck, he took that bite. That sound made his stomach lurch, but he could still stop, right, he should stop, yet the smell hit first, sweet, unbearable, and he chewed, closed his eyes while the caramel softened against his tongue. He wanted to fucking dissolve, but eating that would have given him something different to fight, something to think about that wasn’t the way he had fucked up once again.
His breathing got uneven when he felt the presence behind him, he froze, feeling his eyes filling with tears as he turned towards his mother. «Honey?» her voice was reassuring, but he wasn’t reassured. She had come downstairs for tea, one of Dad’s oversized sweaters on her shoulders, her eyes fell to him, and Maren knew she had understood, so he felt his throat closing. He wanted to apologize, he wanted to tell her he had tried, but he didn’t know what that meant. What was he apologising for? Failing to eat a snack? Eating a snack so he could hate himself for a different reason? Or what else. Avoiding telling her, once again, that he liked men as much as he liked women and that, for some reason, to him, that felt like messing up twice as much? God, he had tried so hard. His mourning was silenced.
The chocolate was melting and his hand shook so violently he almost couldn’t hold it anymore, but Yuna wrapped both arms around his waist before resting her cheek against him, one hand gently covered the one still holding the bar and the other smoothed his hair away from his forehead. «So much fighting. What for?» He didn’t know, but the sentence had broken something inside him. The hockey player sobbed quietly. «I know, baby, I know» she murmured, held him a little tighter, then left a kiss against his hair. «You’re alright.» Maren’s breathing hitched, she repeated herself and he shook his head but she didn’t let go. «You’re alright.» Those words hurt more than if she had scolded him, because she hadn’t looked at the chocolate once, she had only looked at him.
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ever wondered what a hockey captain gets up to when he’s off the ice? while waiting for the 2026-27 season to start, come have a look at 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯 𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳’s theatrical routine with ᴘᴇʟᴏᴛᴏɴ, where movement blends athleticism with choreography. the platform announced the latest expansion of its let yourself go brand, a cinematic collaboration featuring the hockey star alongside instructors tunde oyeneyin and adrian williams, to celebrate the simple joy of movement, as a cultural antidote to fitness fatigue that shifts the conversation from the obligation of exercise to the unleashing of a powerful sense of personal freedom.
“let yourself go feels very in line with my beliefs. it’s amazing what fitness can do for your life. i think everyone needs a form of movement that liberates them,” said maren. “movement is the quickest way to get out of sticky feelings. whether that’s dancing or exercise…i think it's just a key component, especially to how i live.”
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The argument had followed the hockey player all the way to his car, he had driven in silence, both hands on the steering wheel, his jaw aching from how long he had kept it clenched, while his boyfriend’s words remained in the vehicle with him as faithfully as a second passenger. ‘You don’t love me the way you say you do, you only convinced yourself you do’. And then, worse, ‘I don’t think you’ve ever really gotten over him’.
He had wanted to laugh when he heard it, but that wasn’t fucking funny. It made him want to throw up, actually. There was something almost unbearable about being accused of the one thing he had spent so much trying not to become. He had wanted to turn around and say that he had loved him so carefully precisely because he knew what happened when love was given to the wrong person. He had wanted to explain that there were entire rooms inside him that he kept locked, not because there was somebody else living in them, but because he was afraid of what might happen if anyone was allowed to see what had been left behind. Instead, he had felt angry. Hurt. The problem with Maren’s anger was that it couldn’t be compared to weather, no stupid “hurricane” and blah, blah, blah, it actually arrived like architecture, it built itself around him, so by the time he changed route and found himself standing in front of the old house in Ottawa, he felt less like a person returning somewhere than a wound. The house looked smaller than he remembered, uglier, so ugly it almost offended him. He stared at the dusty windows, at the porch with its peeling paint, and he remembered sitting on those steps with a stupid green protein shake between his knees. He remembered thinking, once, that the place was his and it was safe. The thought made something inside him twist enough to unlock the door. The house smelled exactly wrong, old wood and stagnant air. For several seconds, nothing happened, then he saw the first photograph lying facedown on a shelf so he picked it up. There they fucking were, himself, stupid with happiness, standing beside the person who had taught him that happiness could be used as leverage. There was an openness to his face that made him feel embarrassed, his shoulders were loose, his eyes were soft, he looked like someone who believed that being loved was a thing that happened to you once you were good enough. He stared at the photograph until his vision blurred.
«Look at me. You did this. Broke me to the point I know destroy everything I touch. Everything I love.» The room, naturally, offered no defense. Maren threw the photograph against the wall, which struck the plaster. That should have been the end of it. Instead, something in him gave way. He grabbed the nearest chair and hurled it across the room hard enough to leave a pale crater. The noise was loud, but he laughed and swept everything from the shelves with both arms, sending books, ornaments, old frames and forgotten pieces of somebody else’s life crashing onto the floor. Glass broke beneath his shoes, so he tore open a cupboard and began pulling things out without looking at them, plates, bowls, matching mugs. There was no satisfaction in it. He was not destroying the house because he wanted to feel powerful, but because he had spent too many days believing that if he could only become good enough, he might undo what had happened to him, and now the one he loved the most had looked at all that damage and mistaken it for evidence of another love. He had looked at the hesitation before, the pain, the instinctive suspicion that rose whenever somebody promised they would stay, and decided that somewhere beneath all of it there was still an ex waiting. There wasn’t. There was only the wreckage, and now, he had wrecked him too.
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Maren opened the wardrobe and clothes spilled out around his feet, he recognized some of them, so he seized the fabric and ripped them apart. «You made me like this. Dead dove: do not eat.» His voice broke on the last word and he hated that what his ex had taken from him, more than anything, was not love, love was stubborn, love survived people, but certainty. He had taken the uncomplicated belief that another person could touch you without eventually finding the softest part of you and deciding to press there.
He had taught Maren to examine affection for hidden conditions, to hear abandonment inside ordinary silences, to interpret every change in tone as a warning. He had made trust feel like stupidity and Maren had spent months pretending that he was simply difficult. He was not difficult, he was fucking frightened. The hockey player stumbled into the next room and found the old paint cans stacked against the wall, he opened one, the color was wrong, old and separated, but he did not care, he picked it up and threw it against the wall. Colours ran downward in thick, uneven trails, swallowing the pale surface. Soon the walls were streaked with violent, careless marks, paint dragged across old photographs, over doorframes, across the floorboards. Maren stood in the middle of it, breathing through his mouth, his hands covered to the wrists.
«This is what you left me with.» His voice was quieter now. «You made me incapable of loving anyone without making them pay for what you did, apparently. I do it all wrong.» The accusation sounded ridiculous in the empty room, but it was also the truest thing he had ever said. He thought of his boyfriend that morning, the hurt in his face. He dropped to his knees and began collecting the photographs, tickets, receipts, polaroids, a birthday card, a cinema stub and he gathered them all into the wastebasket. Then he struck the lighter, his hand shook so badly that he nearly dropped it, the small flame illuminated his fingers and he held it over the pile.
«Fucking rot» he whispered and then he let go. The fire caught slowly and Maren sat down beside the basket, the house was quiet again, except for the soft crackling in front of him. Smoke curled upward and disappeared into the darkened room. He watched the photographs bend and blacken, watched familiar faces disappear behind flame, watched pieces of his own past become indistinguishable from ash. He reached into his coat and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, took one between his fingers and for a second he simply held it there, staring at the burning basket, then he leaned forward and lit the cigarette from the fire. He drew in slowly, held it, exhaled and closed his eyes. «I hope you’re miserable until you’re dead.»
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