Prologue
Bohdan
Somewhere in the multiverse, if you believe in that sort of thing, twenty-year-old me sees eighteen-year-old her for the first time.
He sees her through the scratched-up glass surrounding the ice when he’s supposed to be focused on a million other things.
She smiles quietly, nodding along with her friends, blinking beautiful blue eyes a bit too much, like maybe she’s trying not to cry, with these wisps of raven hair tumbling around her face.
Dark all over, except for those shining eyes.
All of her shines under the shitty lighting, actually.
Zlatí?ko, little gold, he thinks when he skates by.
I imagine the story shakes out more or less the same in those endless, rolling universes.
He bangs on the glass for her attention before the half, and tries to shout over the music and noise of the crowd that he wants her number.
She figures it out eventually, and she does wipe a shaky hand across her cheeks, tears glistening on her fingertips. He finds out later that sometimes that just happens, even though she wishes it didn’t.
But that night, she hands him what turns out to be a Polaroid picture of her, taken by one of her friends minutes earlier, her number scribbled across the back.
I bet he calls her before he’s even changed out of his equipment after the game.
But I’d like to think in at least one of those universes, even though the years probably go on more or less the same in all of them, and as much as I hope some things turn out differently for him, I mostly hope that in at least one, he goes to sleep beside her.
He wakes up beside her. That he sees her every day in all the ways you see a person when you make a life with them, and he doesn’t have to resort to pulling that ancient, peeling, fraying photograph out of his wallet each day to get a glimpse of her.
It couldn’t be this one. But the idea that maybe it’s happening for some version of me out there somewhere makes it feel a bit easier to breathe in this one when that hidden picture is all I’ve got.