Page 2 of About to Fall

There it was. The crack in the perfect prince facade.

The ugly thing in my chest purred.

He pulled his hand back and turned to face the cameras, smile back in place, posture impeccable. But I'd seen it. That flicker of something real underneath—anger, maybe, or wounded pride, or just the basic human reaction of fuck you that anyone would have when some asshole deliberately twisted the knife.

I'd gotten under his skin.

And I wanted to do it again.

I went back to Vancouver with a gold medal and showed it to my father over dinner three days later.

“That's great, Adrian,” he said, without looking up from his phone.

Cool. Fine. Whatever. I put it on my dresser next to the others and told myself I didn't need anyone to make exceptions for me or break their precious rules to let me in.

I would make myself impossible to ignore instead.

2. Nico (Age 21)

I’d been chasing gold for most of my life.

Obsessing over it, really. Like a mortal seeking divinity. Ever since I was five years old and my uncle placed his Olympic gold medal in my tiny hands. The weight of it. The way it caught the light. The way everyone in the room had looked at him—like he had done something that mattered, something that would last, something that made him special in a way ordinary people weren’t.

I wanted that. I wanted it so badly it became the architecture of my entire existence.

So I worked. And worked. And worked. While most eight year olds were worrying about homework and birthday parties and who was sitting with whom at lunch, I was at the rink. Before school. After school. Weekends. Holidays. I learned to stretch until my muscles screamed and then stretched further. I learned to fall and get up and fall again until the falling didn’t scare me anymore. I learned that tired was a state of mind and pain was temporary and nothing—nothing—mattered more than the next competition, the next score, the next step toward that gleaming circle of gold.

I sacrificed my childhood. My friendships. Any chance of a life outside of skating. I told myself it would be worth it. I told myself that when I stood on that podium, when they played the anthem, when they put that medal around my neck—everything I had given up would make sense. The loneliness. The exhaustion. The hollow feeling that crept in during the quiet moments when there was nothing to train for and no one to perform for.

Now I was 21 years old and the reigning Canadian men’s figure skating champion. The Olympics were within my grasp.

And I was so, so tired.

The thing about chasing something your whole life was that you didn't notice when the chase became the only thing you knew. When the wanting became more familiar than the having. When you'd built your entire identity around the pursuit and forgotten to ask yourself if you'd even recognize satisfaction if it found you.

What was wrong with me? I had a loving family. I had my best friend Kat. I had everything I was supposed to want. And still there was this emptiness, this gnawing thing that no medal or relationship or accomplishment had ever managed to fill.

I kept reaching for things to fill it anyway.

When Théo ended things, it should not have surprised me.

Théo and I had started dating at eighteen—two kids in the same program, orbiting the same ice, breathing the same rarefied air of elite competition. It had felt inevitable. He was brilliant and disciplined and understood this life in a way no one outside of skating ever could. We didn't have to explain the early mornings or the missed birthdays or the way your entire self-worth could hinge on a single jump sequence. He just knew.

For a while, that felt like love. Maybe it was.

But we were also terrible for each other. Feeding each other's worst insecurities. Making excuses for toxic habits. Mistaking codependence for devotion.

By the end, Théo was running on empty. The pressure of competing at the top level while hiding a relationship that was slowly consuming us both—it broke something in him. He collapsed after his free skate at Worlds.

He went to rehab. And somewhere in the clarity of recovery, he told me what I think we'd both known for a long time—that he loved me, but we were hurting each other, and we needed to end things so we could both heal.

I said I understood. Said all the right things to make it easier on him—he already hated himself enough for both of us. Because that was what I did. I made other people's exits easy, even when they were destroying me.

And when it was over, I hadn't taken a breath before jumping into things with Julien. Another relationship. Another failure. Another person I tried to make love me because I didn't know how to be alone.

Was it the same thing? This desperate wanting to be loved—was it just another version of chasing gold? Another finish line I thought would fix me if I could just reach it?

My mother was worried about me so I was at my parents' house for the weekend. I had been working too hard, looking thin. That was her polite way of saying I looked like shit. She thought a weekend at home would fix it—home cooked meals, fresh air, sleeping in my childhood bedroom surrounded by old trophies and faded posters of skaters I had idolized.