The Killer Instinct

I was 12 years old when I was informed I was a sociopath with the “killer instinct” and 13 when I had my first dead friend.

There’s a single trait that all middle aged soccer dad’s share that no one knows about it. It’s the single depraved, unspoken thread bonding all the Patricks and Aidans and Craigs sitting on the aluminum visitor benches kicking up astro turf while their boys finish their 15 minute quad stretching routine and it only surfaces when evoked. That thread is blood lust.

I would know because as a small 12 year old child I was the evoking party of said blood lust. I chummed the waters, bloodied the spray painted 15 yard box at pantry park.

Now I should first qualify what I mean by a small 12 year old child. I don’t mean small in the normal 12 year old, 4 foot 5 way. I mean aggressively, clinically, perplexingly small.

My childhood growth chart, which I had unintentionally and shamefully memorized by the time I was 7 years old, showed that my “bone age” was delayed by three years from my peers.

“Bone age” refers to your physical, developmental age and is also a merciless, negligent term. Unfortunatley I only realized the latter after I made the mistake of sharing the fact that my bone age was three years delayed with my grade 8 classmates. The information almost immediately became perverted into the fact that my boner age was that of a three year old. It wasn’t, but despite my insistence to the contrary it proved a far catchier fact than the truth, and incidentally, unshakable. And so it was common knowledge at Glen Ames Public School that my boner age was three.

The growth chart itself looked like a sad ski hill. It was gently slopped at the bottom and top while the center of the chart - representing the ages of 5-15 - was set at a terriflyingly steep angle, ostensibly when the majority of young male growth was to be done. This wasn’t the case for me, as evidenced to me by the little dots the doctors would scartch onto my chart, far below the development expected for my age. My dots, as opposed to riding the ski slope up to an average height and a life of normalcy; of walking through high-school halls not gawked at; of a fighting chance athletically; of maybe one day a girl seeing me as a legitimate man and an adequate romantic partner - my dots were buried deep deep beneath the snow, having been run over by an avalanche of physical delay, surely suffocating and dying a slow, lonely, short person’s death.

This delay, according to my chart, started at the age of three, with normal growth until that point followed by a perplexing and aggressive drop off. This drop off coupled with my subsequent inability to digest food (this manifested unfortunately in perennial diarrhea, upwards of 4 times a day) and complete lack of hunger for my entire childhood was a mystery no doctor was able to solve, though that didn’t stop them from trying, sticking needles in my arm by weekly for ten years.

I wasn’t sure exactly what they were hoping to deduce from the bloodwork as I was fairly certain my diarrhea was a result of something in my digestive track and not something in the crook of my arm. I hadn’t the time to be concerned with the logic of their tests however, as I was far more concerned with my consuming childhood terror of needles.

I have very few prepubescent memories and unfortunately they all involve me crying hysterically and attempting to run away.

Once I saw a man in a Pennsylvania Mcdonalds holding what I thought was a taser. I burst into silent tears and begged my family to immediately evacuate to the car to make a speedy getaway, a request which was ignored to my enduring resentment.

I was cheated out of a birthday party egg toss victory by who I considered in that moment to be a spiteful old cunt (I didn’t know the word “cunt” yet, but I knew the feeling. My inner dialogue would have been something closer to “a spiteful old …” followed by an angry grumbling space, or perhaps a precocious, self-censoring bleep). I cried and left.

(I recognize, by the way, that these stories are painting me as a small, demonic, pestilent, entirely unbearable child, and I’d very much like to refute this or at lease believe it wasn’t always the case. Unfortunatley the only memories seared into my long term brain centers from that period are those seared by my childhood fury and tears. So, though the sample size is small, the totality of my memories do corroberate this picture: that I was a shit).

And perhaps my first memory - the chronology gets muddy this far back - was of flailing about a pediatric hospital attempting to squirm away from an oncoming needle. I remember very few specifics of this one, but I do remember the feeling. And what a horrific feeling. It felt very much how I would imagine the terror would feel of being bound to one of those 1980s film villains conveyor belts pushing you towards an open oven.

(Why do so many film villans own conveyor belts? Is it for the simple pleasure of morbid foreplay? Who make these torture conveyor belts? The same companies that make industrial ones? Who installs them? Are there no flags raised by the innocent installation workers of the potential danger of placing a hacksaw at the foot of a belt?)

I wasn’t alone in this mortal terror of needles it turns out. For whatever reason, to a small, diverse, yet passionate sect of young children the prospect of a needle is akin to the prospect of certain demise or the pain of unanesthetized amputation.

I discovered I wasn’t alone in this fear when I discovered the paraphernalia they sell to assuage it. A singular highlight of my childhood was the moment I found my first anesthesia patch at the Shoppers Drugmart.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of intimate acquantance with an anesthesia patch, here’s how it works. It is a small adhesive circle, about two inches by two inches. You stick it on your arm and in fifteen minutes a small radius of your skin is completely numb. Simple. Elegant. Perfect.

I bought a patch. Tried it. Fifteen minutes later I pinched my skin till it bled and felt nothing. It was glorious. Not a single twinge of pain. A solution to my crippling, devestating fear, sparing my parents and the hospital attendents nearly as much greif as it spared me.

The only remaining problem, I had discovered during my first few years of testing, was that the doctors never seemed to poke you in the same place. For whatever reason where they extracted from seemed to be a product of completely random choice. One day it was left arm, crook of the elbow. The next week it was right wrist. I was waiting in quiet terror for the shoe to drop and the doctors to inform me they were to be extracting from the underside of my eyelid that day, or from under my fingernail.

With a fifteen minute wait period for the anesthesia to set in I didn’t have enough time in the paediatric office to find out where the impact point of the needle would be and then apply the patch. I’d be leaving the doctor, and worse yet, my parents waiting, and it was made clear to me by the latter that this was unacceptable.

I didn’t come to my solution proudly, but I did come to it decisively, it being the only sufficient course of action. I would apply dozens of patches to every conceivable place blood could be draw from. A few on each wrist, a few on each inner elbow, and the remaining wherever I felt there might be an off chance of receiving a prick. The shoulder for example. An ankle.

In this way, though my bravery was patch-induced, I overcame my fear of needles. Unfortunately from my new found equanimity, I was only weeks later introduced to a new fear. The fear of colonoscopies.

The doctors had, after years insisting on blood-testing, and only weeks after I learned how to calmly oblige them, decided the needles were a fools errand. The problem with my digestion would of course be found in my digestive track. I must have been livid, my suspicion finally having been heeded after so much pain, but not so livid that I remember it. What I do remember instead was the moment I first had a colonoscopy explained to me.

For the uninitiated, a colonoscopy is having a camera shoved up your rectum to photograph the inside of your stomach for abnormalities. This is a procedure almost always reserved for the 50 Plus demographic, and while I’m sure there is an element of practicality in waiting until the fifties to send the cameras in, I think the decision to wait is also one of mercy. The older patient only has to live half their lives, at most, knowing that there exists POV footage weaving up their anus and through their intestines. I, on the other hand, had to bear the weight of this knowledge at 14.

Equally intimidating, and far more difficult than the invasion itself, was the requisite fasting for 48 house in advance of the procedure. I discovered during this time my unfortunate, profound, and constitutional flakiness. To my deep personal disappointment I was forced to recognize that I am not one of the hearty few who would be able to survive in the wild in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle if, say, our society was hit by an EMP and regressed. I was a competitive, athletic boy as well as a short one, so being physically capable was a desperate point of pride for me, but a measly twelve hours into fasting I was deeply, existentially struggling. I knew then that regardless of even the hazard of hunting and stone-age tribal warfare, I simply wouldn’t be able to bear the discomfort of hunger. If I had to say, skip my mid-morning toast, as I was barbarically forced to do in preparation for the colonoscopy, it felt to me highly likely I would expire right there, feebly and sadly, on the spot.

Expiring feebly and sadly. This is how the doctor should have explained the procedure if he had the nerve to be honest.

Beyond the starvation, I was also made to drink a medicine - MiraLAX - which cleared out my bowls, forcing violent diarrhea for dozens of hours on end. The irony wasn’t lost on me that to solve my indigestion I had to trek through the fires of far worse indigestion.

What also wasn’t lost on me was a detail the doctor had shared as he had explained the fast; that there was a Burger King in the basement of the hospital. That perhaps after my procedure my mother would let me have a hamburger.

This detail both haunted me and was the single flickering light at the end of my dank tunnel of starvation and diarrhea. During my fast, almost constantly, I  scoured the Burger King menu on the internet for what would be my post-op order. I would drool, lit up by the relentless blue light shining from our bulbous first-gen iMac and the vibrance of my fantasies, running the options over in my head. Maybe I’d have a milkshake. Fries? A hotdog? A classic burger? A bacon double cheese burger?

I would oscillate between reading the Burger King digital menu and painful diarrhea. I was obsessed, devote even. By the end of the second day I was praying to the Gods of bacon and double cheese.

My procedure was fine, nothing to write home about. They knocked me out and it was done. They didn’t find anything abnormal, the uncertainty of which, though it was technically reassuring as finding anything would have been bad news, was still disappointing.

I didn’t care about any of that, however. My first thought upon waking up was, predictably, the same thought that had been plaguing me for days: burger.

Now usually, after such potent anticipation, the object of it never lives up to expectation. Such is the nature of anxious fantasizing, I’ve found, after endless experimentation. The bacon double cheese burger however, was glorious. In fact, it was the second best burger I’ve ever had (top four if I’m honest, sharing the rarified air with Mercer Kitchen in New York and Burgers Never Say Die in La).

The best burger I’ve ever had I now consider a curse of good luck.

I was 17 years old in Amsterdam and decided that if I was ever to start smoking weed - I had made the socially stilting decision of sobriety in high school - this would be the place to do it. Betraying my own naivety on the subject of marijuana, I shared a joint with my friend. Put another way, I smoked drastically, hopelessly too much for a virgin smoker.

Inexplicably however, I didn’t dissolve into a jumble of nauseous paranoia, as I was liable to do later in life after just a second puff. Somehow, perhaps by some twist of divine first-timer forgiveness, I was euphoric and fully-functioning. I pranced through the streets of Amsterdam, my first high manifesting in an unexpected way: I became the most beloved film characters from my childhood. hurdling through one cinematic universe after another. I wasn’t pretending to be Jack Sparrow. I was Jack Sparrow. And then I was Jim Hawkins from Treasure Planet. Then I was buddy the volleyball Lab from Air Bud: Spikes Back. I danced about, leapt off small curbs, revelled in the most profound, fulfilling, hallucinatory bout of juvenile escapism of my life, until I found myself in line for the McDonalds at Muntplein 9.

I ordered a cheeseburger. A simple cheeseburger. This menu I didn’t deliberate over for days. I wasn’t breaking a 48 hour fast. This was a spur of the moment, off the cuff, thoughtless, whim. It was an impromtu guess. And it was the single greatest bite of food I had ever had. The cheese burger, under those beating florescent overhead tubes, was golden. It didn’t taste like gold. It tasted like how gold felt. It was divine. By some fluke I had survived a poisonous amount of THC and found myself having the greatest cuisinal experience I knew I would ever have.

And then the thought struck me: How depressing. What a curse. People dedicate their lives to the cultivation of their culinary craft. There are brilliant, rare, finely aged and culled foods out there, delicacies of the highest order, and the sure peak of my cuisinal life was in a European McDonalds at 2 am while Theo the British eurorailer vomited in the corner.

So… I was small.

And being small in a world of competitive contact soccer there was only one appropriate compensation, so I was told: to become a vicious competitor. The only way I could keep up, my father informed me, was if I took the fight to my towering opponents. I was force-fed both food I was incapable of digesting and platitudes like “the bigger they are the harder they fall”, “never say die”, “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog”, and on one memorable occasion in which someone’s nose bleed had stained my white soccer shorts “they’re blood looks good on you.”

Everything that possibly could have been done to condition me to become a psychopath was done, and it wasn’t entirely ineffective, though it didn’t stick in the end.

I did compete like it was life or death. I did challenge and topple the biggest opponents. I did revel in chaos, destruction, and violence. And the soccer dads loved it.

For some inexplicable reason they all identified with the certifiable lunacy and borderline sadism of my play-style. They would, in fact, denigrate all the other young boys, including their own children, as spoilt and dilettantes, as opposed to the chronologically delayed me, who they lauded as truly vicious. I possessed, they would say glowingly, genuinley bad intentions on the field.

The unspoken and truly perplexing implication was that each of the fathers themselves had shared that destructive, desperate competitiveness in their day and that somehow the “warrior’s mentality” had been lost in the generational gap between them and their sons.

The only soccer father who I felt could rightfully appraise my viciousness was Liam, the ex-military sniper and father of Aidan, the other defensive center-mid, who was gritty as hell but sadly not all that violent, I thought.

I didn’t have much interaction with Liam, but to my satisfaction, the few times we did, my ferocity was always validated.

Liam once took my entire 12-year-old soccer team on a field trip to the gun range. Predictably all of the other players, I remember, had wide scatters of bullets, many shots missing the paper target altogether. My ‘scatter’ on the other hand, according to Liam, was tightly bunched. I heard this through the short grape vine of my father to me, the grape vine through which all the compliments affirming my psychopathy filtered.

This tight scatter was the indication, Liam said, that I had the “killer instinct.” I didn’t know exactly how such a deep, morbid psychological trait could have been gleaned from such a superficial accomplishment, one which I thought spoke more to a steadiness of hand than a homicidal capability, but I wanted the compliment desperately, so I took it. I was the special child on the team who one day perhaps could aspire to snipe away human lives without moral qualm or physical obstacle.

The only other noteworthy memories I had with Liam were when he stepped in as a substitute coach to run a military conditioning drill for our team of Under 12s designed to illicit tunnel vision - this is a blackening of ones peripheries by lack of blood flow to the brain - and when he had posed the ‘funeral test’ to my father.

I was a mere four foot observer to the riddle which was being posed at an altitude, both physically and intellectually, far over my head, I was sure. Still, even knowing I had no earthy shot at solving it, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop.

The riddle went as follows (see if you can solve it. Don’t cheat. It’s important. I’ll tell you why after):

A women was at her mother’s funeral. She met a man, and they hit it off. She had no idea who he was but their chemistry was great and she liked him. Unfortunaley they didn’t exchange contact information or even names, and then they were separated during the service. She looked for him after but he was gone.

For the next few weeks she asked around with other people who were present at the service but no one knew who he was.

Two weeks later she killed her sister. Why?

I’ll give you some time with that. Think about it. Re-read it if you need to.

Did the answer pop into your head immediately when asked the final question? It didn’t for my father, so the riddle was retold by Liam. I listened in more closely this time, because for me, an answer had popped up. A very simple answer. Far too obvious, I thought, for an adult riddle. Especially for a riddle my father was struggling with.

So I listened intently. Liam finished the riddle once again and still my father had no clue, and still my answer seemed the only logical one. I was embarrassed because it was so simple and in saying it I would clearly reveal that the nuances of the problem had gone over my head, but I couldn’t help it.

I put my hand up meekly, was called on by the ex-military sniper, and I gave my guess:

“She killed her sister so there would be another family funeral.”

Liam stared at me. I could sense my father register this and then bristle, ostensibly embarrassed by the stupidity and presumptuousness of my guess. I could feel myself going red and so I sputtered my rational, more as an apology for trying than anything else.

“The man was at the mother’s funeral, so maybe the lady thought if she killed the sister there would be--”

“Another family funeral”, Liam interrupted.

I nodded.

Liam gave me a weary smile, then leaned in to my father and muttered something conspiratorially. My father looked down at me and I could feel his edginess settling, relieved - even proud.

Now, I should pause here to ask if you got the correct answer. Was it as simple for you as it had been for me? If it was, you might be a sociopath.

When Liam walked away, my father revealed to me what he had whispered to him: The riddle was actually a sociopath test. Sociopaths were able to separate logic from empathy, ignoring the family dynamics and any potential feelings, and seeing the murder for what it was - tactical.

Liam had then said to my father that if I ever wanted to go into military sniping he would help make the connections.

My “passing” of this test catalyzed a rampant, anxious obsession that spanned the next ten years of my life (consuming obsessions were par for the course at this point in my adolescence).

Was I a socipath? I didn’t want to be one. In fact I desperately hoped I wasn’t one. I didn’t know why, but the prospect of sociopathy just felt wrong. It felt like I’d be missing out on life’s greatest gifts - emotion.

I threw myself into a digital investigation on sociopathy. I learned everything I possibly could about the disorder, ranking each symptom against my own predispositions.

For simplicities sake, and because I actually don’t remember many of the intricacies of the disorder, sociopathy is categorized by a complete lack of empathy and guilt. Psychopathy is sociopathy plus violent tendancies.

I had my unique tendencies, that I had to admit to myself: My scatter had “the killer instinct”, I was a life-or-death soccer player, and I had aced the family funeral test. This was enough kindling to keep the blaze of my anxiety around sociopathy lit, unquelled even by the simple fact the I did posses empathy and was capable of profound guilt. In fact, in all moments during the later years of my youth, I was usually, and for no real reason, weighted down by heaps of it.

Online sociopathy test after online sociopathy test - and I obsessively consumed them - confirmed that I wasn’t in fact a sociopath, but nothing could assuage my fear. What had once been a fear of needles had become a fear of myself.

What these tests, if they were slightly more expansive in their search, might have told me was that my tendencies combined with my subsequent fixation on sociopathy actually revealed something closer to a clinical anxiety and perhaps a placement somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum, but alas, the online sociopath tests weren’t slightly more expansive. I spent hours of my youth answering questions like “Unlike others, I am mostly optimistic. Agree or Disagree”, “My personal achievements are important”, and “On a scale of one to ten, do you kill helpless animals?”

Most of the tests, after the 10 minute questionnaire, returned a page requesting a one-time payment of $1.99 for results. In those moments I did have murderous ideations, but of all the results that were returned for free, none pointed to sociopathy. They would often show a dial hued on a gradient from green to yellow to red, red being most egregiously deranged, my needle pointing towards green with text reassuring that I only shared some mild traits with the Fortune 500 anti-socials of the world.

(I graduated eventually to taking online autism tests, and made the mistake of once taking one with my friends. Even my quirkiest, most sensory-problemed friends’ results came back stating something in the vicinity of “you share tendencies with those on the Autism Spectrum Disorder”. My results page referred me to local clinics to be officially diagnosed.)

Despite my reassuring sociopathy results, the fear that perhaps I was deluding myself and the digital quiz by answering disingenuously, was enough to keep me painfully on my toes for years to come.

During my high-school years I quit playing soccer, abandoning what was by then my severely injured, limping, yet persisting dream of going pro, in favour of a short stint in competitive boxing and what would be a much longer attempt to heal my spirit and lower my guard.

The decision to leave the cleats on the field, though it was in the end a necessary one (the journey commenced by that first painful, cleatless step, I truly believe led to the salvation of my soul - or, if you prefer a secular bent, at least of my psyche), was crushing.

It was a decision that was nearly impossible to come to and harder still to admit aloud. Soccer hadn’t just been my dream, it hadn’t just been an impenetrable social defence (I didn’t need my peers to accept me. I was going to be a professional soccer player. And that was far more important), it hadn’t just been my only outlet for an adolescent pain and trauma I had no earthly shot at otherwise processing, it hadn’t just been a tireless friend willing to take all the obsession and emotion and violence I could muster unflinchingly on the chin, and it hadn’t just been the only social situation in my life I actually understood let alone thrived in. Soccer had been my childhood. And to my devestation, it was ending.

It wasn’t as much of a choice as I would like to believe, but it deeply painful nonetheless. The truth was no professional teams had shown legitimate interest in me. The size disparity had grown too drastic to overcome as puberty hit, or so I was told by my couches who made the dispiriting suggestion that I play with the younger squad, and I could no longer foresee a path to the place I wanted to go; the place I had desperately fantasized about for the first formative decade in my life; the English Premiere League.

Soccer was gone. The dream was dead. And yet, I hadn’t escaped it. It haunted me.

There were early signs that I had made the right long-term decision. Only months after stopping, my digestive issues righted themselves and I began to grow, albeit only slightly. Evidently it was the constant running, the relentless stress on my body and mind from my combative style of play, that had been a weight too great to bear on my immune system and digestive track. Of course I didn’t recognize this at the time, for my growth coincidentally coincided with a doctor’s offhand suggestion I try to “cut back on the gluten”, a diet which, after witnessing my first glorious inch of growth in God know’s how long, I embraced with an equal fanaticism with which I had soccer. I also mellowed out a little and made a couple of friends in the back of my 10th grade extended French class.

Though the signs where there, they were far from reassuring. I was plagued by guilt daily. I had failed my dream, the only thing I would ever be happy doing with my life, I was certain at the time. I had backed down. I had said die. It no longer mattered the size of the dog, for he was not in the fight.

Perplexingly, I was most burdened by the knowledge that there was a fight happening somewhere out there at the half line of a patchy King City soccer field that I wasn’t a part of. It was a fight I desperately wanted to forgo - no part of me enjoying it anymore, if I ever had - but it was a fight that for some reason I felt absconding from was a gross personal failure. The guilt followed me everywhere, quiet but relentless. It was my shadow through my fourteenth and fifteenth year.

I was boxing more competitively then, on the long runway before my first amateur fight at 17, and yet somehow that combat didn’t pay my debt of masochism to myself. It wasn’t soccer. It wasn’t the same. The guilt persisted.

I remember a sunny Saturday morning my father was driving me to The Training Room Gym (as it happened, a gym almost entirely comprised of boxing gangsters, undercover cops, and gay body builders) to train and spar two fighters. It was a pleasant drive and that ate me alive until I was hollow. Saturday mornings I used to drive to soccer games, the entire time wracked with a brewing amalgum of anxiety and rage. I knew I would be battered and do my best to batter the lumbering pubescent giants opposing me, and I would leave bloodied and exhausted. Those were Saturday mornings. I hated them, but they were right. Not this, I thought to myself as I climbed out of the car at the boxing gym at 10 am, rather than the harrowing 6 am of yesteryear. Not this, a couple of measly hours training on the bag and a handful of measly rounds taking measly punches to the measly head. The dream was dead, but the ghost of soccer was there tapping my shoulder in the sun, reminding me what I had done, and that I would never escape it no matter how far I ran.

And then my dad said “who died?” into his cellphone. From this point forward, the memory is crystal clear.

I stood under the gentle blue sky and sun, the kind of sky and sun that seems always to come and greet you with heartbreak. There was a light breeze and I watched my father on the phone. He was calm. And so was I. Someone had died but you wouldn’t have known from the tenor of his call, nor my demeanour. I felt a distant, vague anxiety but nothing else. I simply watched him.

He asked a few question then hung up. He told me AJ had died; my friend from soccer. It had been a car crash early that morning.

I said “oh” and then truly felt nothing but the breeze and the sun.

This was the first time the news of death had ever been broken to me, but I knew my reaction was incorrect. Death is terribly sad. My friend had died at 15 years old. I was supposed to be distraught, wasn’t I, collapsing against the car perhaps, beating my fists? I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, but it was abundantly clear that my complete lack of a reaction was wrong. I attempted to adopt a sullen tone, but even then I didn’t know what to say, so I muttered again, “Oh… That’s terrible.”

I had no idea what people were supposed to say. It all felt pointless and flippant. How do you, holding your teenager gym-bag, wearing your teenager sleeveless boxing shirt, looking up at your father, begin to summon a sentiment that matches the gravity of death? It’s an impossible task. And I was failing.

My father nodded, perhaps, I thought, perceiving my emotional shortcoming, and mercifully let me go into the gym.

I went about my business regularly. I wrapped my hands, stretched out my legs, warmed up my shoulders. I would be sparring before the rest of my training today.

Before climbing through the ropes, and for no other reason I was conscious of than a vague feeling it was the appropriate thing to do, I decided to inform my coach about AJ.

I whispered it to him lest I disturb any of the other fighters, it being an irreconcilably awkward thing to say I felt at the time. “My friend died.” And then I broke. Amongst the Russian gangsters who populated the boxing gym, my one foot through the ropes on the canvas, laced up for what battle would come, stepping forward towards rest of my life, my other foot hanging back in the direction of my life gone by, my childhood, soccer, every desperately competed game and thousands of practises alone with only the night and the floodlights and my team, with AJ… there I cried on the shoulder of my coach.

I lost every round that day. Though it’s obvious now, I couldn’t understand why I was slow. My body wouldn’t listen to me. It was tired. I was hit by every punch. That felt appropriate.

I found out more about AJ’s death in the days to come. It was a car crash through the guard rail of the Don Valley Parkway into the river. The car was full of his high school friends. He was the only one who passed. I made the mistake of watching the news footage of firefighters attempting to pull him from the sunken car. It was surreal and upsetting. Everything about it just felt wrong; the details of the video simply incorrect.

The firefighters huddled on the roof of the car in a small, perplexingly calm group as one after the other jumped down into the river. The water only reached their shins. The river was so shallow, the precipice between life and death so close and yet somehow impossibly out of reach.

It felt a cosmic mistake, AJ’s passing, and to this day I’m not convinced it wasn’t. Though it is incongruous with my personal spiritual beliefs about the intentional unfolding of life, in a situation like this, the passing of such a young man, how could a case be made for anything but divine error.

AJ was a good kid. He was a leader on the team; an engaged player; talented; he had a good right foot, often taking our corners and free kicks. I remember him now standing on the corner dot with his hand raised, about to curl one into the box. He was kind and funny. And he was gone. That, I knew at 15, was simply incorrect. An error begging for amendment from an editorial hand that wouldn’t come.

Nothing had felt quite right for a long time and his funeral was the final extension of that. Everything felt uncanny, a hollow reflection of something else, something vague and general; a stereotype.

The truth was we were young boys and no one knew how to grieve. That’s why it all seemed performative and confused; self consious. Because it was. I remember turning around during a speech in the church and seeing my teammate beside his parents. He was wearing sunglasses inside. He was 15. Something about that image, Sam in black sunglasses, I have never shaken. I suppose it felt surreal, and to a degree pretend, as did the rest of the funeral. It felt like we, who only years prior danced across the beaches of Blackpool eating ice cream and playing beach futsal, stinging our shins on the sand and the vinyl ball, had now been dressed up in the accoutrements of mourning and were expected to act accordingly. We were lost then, guided only by the films we had seen, the adults who knew how to grieve correctly, the men who knew how to hide their tears behind black glasses inside.

Our only truth in that moment was a great sadness, and we all shared it, and it was the only thing that would go unspoken, masked by our performances. That sadness is still there today, for all of us. Though I haven’t spoken to those boys in years, and have never spoken to them about AJ, I know it is. Some things don’t leave you. The death of a childhood friend and teammate is one of them.

We all shared a table at the wake, me and my teammates. The sunglasses had come down - we had made it through the most formal and precarious of the proceedings; the church - and we allowed ourself to be a little more candid. There was almost no conversation about AJ, of course - that we couldn’t touch - but I remember being surprised by our friendliness. These were my teammates, yes, but also my greatest competitors, the people with whom my temper would flare most aggressively, and vice versa. We sharpened our teeth on each-others cleats. There had always been an edge to our companionship. We went to battle with each other, but also, undeniably, against each other. And I hadn’t seen any of them since I quit the team.

Now, somehow, it felt different. Kinder.

It became abundantly clear as we sat there that afternoon in our ill-fitting suits, ignoring our sadness, sharing shallow compliments and reminiscences, that something had changed. There had been an indelible shift. We weren’t men yet, but we weren’t boys anymore. That was done now.

Sitting there at that table at AJ’s wake was the moment the page finally closed on our childhoods. At least it did on mine.

There was no childhood after soccer, and there was no childhood after AJ.

The confusion I had been feeling, the off-centerdness since I had finished playing, I came to realize, were the natural pangs of my boyhood ending. It was all borne out of the awkward, ambiguous period between childhood and adolescence. The insecurity, the guilt, the confusion, were the growing pain accompanying my first steps towards manhood.

As time passed, these feelings would diminish and I would once again taste the fresh air of hope and passion as I walked forward towards the rest of my life, as I grew to my appropriate bone-age, as I began, faintly, to see potential lives of joy and purpose for myself outside of the theatre of soccer: As I grew up.

I still think about AJ sometimes. Every time I pass the spot he died. Other times too.

Sometimes I wonder if he’d feel awkward with me, the small, psychotic defensive center-mid who wasn’t his closest friend on the team, thinking about him as often as I do. Sometimes I worry I don’t have the right to. That it’s an indulgence of loss.

And yet, even then, I hope he is up there knowing that I’m thinking about him, even if it is awkward, even if he must laugh at me for it.

When I think about him, I think “you’re still missed man.” He is.

-- Toronto and London, 2024