Behind the Ice Wall
Even in that moment, with my body genuinely failing me, some deeply trained instinct insisted I could manage this the way I’d managed everything else — quietly, invisibly, without anyone noticing the wall was actually cracking.
I skated back to my position as the whistle blew again, telling myself to focus, to breathe, to do exactly what years of training had prepared me to do. My vision narrowed instead, the edges of my sight going soft and unreliable, the ice in front of me somehow both too close and impossibly far away at once.
My glove felt heavier than it should have. My legs, seconds earlier fully responsive, now seemed to be operating on a slight delay, as though the signals traveling