2. Jamie
Jamie
My phone vibrates against the polished wood of the bar for what feels like the hundredth time in the last ten minutes, the buzzing insistent and rhythmic enough to feel almost taunting.
I stare at it for a second before I pick it up, even though I already know exactly what is waiting for me on the screen. The same headline. The same seventy-word summary of a decision that has fundamentally rearranged every corner of my life.
The headline has not changed since the last time I looked at it.
NEW YORK GUARDIANS FORWARD JAMIE MAXWELL TRADED TO SEATTLE VIPERS IN OFF-SEASON DEAL
The article has already been swallowed by commentary, speculation, and enough hockey analysis to make it sound like people who have never met me know more about my future than I do.
Analysts who have never been in a locker room a day in their lives are breaking down what this means for my career trajectory and Seattle’s depth structure and some other things I stop caring about halfway through the first paragraph.
I skim it anyway.
Twenty-seven-year-old forward, Jamie Maxwell, has been traded to the Seattle Vipers after spending his entire professional career with the New York Guardians.
Maxwell, who recorded twenty-two goals and thirty-one assists last season, is expected to strengthen Seattle’s forward depth heading into next year after the Vipers aggressively pursued him as part of a multi-player off-season deal.
I stop there. The rest doesn’t matter.
The trade happened. My agent confirmed it.
The Guardians confirmed it. Seattle confirmed it.
Now the internet has stamped it in bold letters and flashing graphics, which means the rest of the world is finally catching up to the thing I’ve been trying to sit with for three days.
Three days of sitting with it, and I still feel like I am digesting something that’s not sitting well on my stomach.
I lock my phone and turn it face down on the bar because reading the same article another ten times will not make any of it feel less real.
The wood is cool and smooth beneath my palm when I flatten my hand against the surface, and I leave it there for a moment like I can anchor myself to something solid.
The television mounted above the liquor shelves is already running highlights from today’s sports cycle.
My face flashes across the screen for half a second, a still from some practice two seasons ago, before disappearing beneath statistics, trade breakdowns, and the kind of scrolling graphics people use when they want to turn someone else’s life into background entertainment.
A graphic appears: MAXWELL TO SEATTLE — WHAT IT MEANS FOR BOTH TEAMS. I watch just long enough to confirm I don’t want to watch it.
I look away, completely done with the spectacle.
Three days ago, my agent, Marcus Hill, called me after midnight and told me the deal was close.
His voice had that particular quality it gets when he is trying to deliver news carefully, each word placed with deliberate precision.
I’d sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and listened to him talk about opportunity and positioning and what the Vipers could offer me that the Guardians couldn’t anymore.
Two days ago, I sat in an office with management and shook hands with men I had spent years playing for while everybody spoke in calm, measured voices about business decisions and long-term strategy.
The handshakes were firm. The smiles were professionally warm.
Everyone in that room said everything they were supposed to say, and I said everything I was supposed to say back, and when I walked out of the building, the sunlight felt wrong.
This morning, I packed the last of my apartment into boxes and signed paperwork I didn’t particularly want to read. I found a coffee mug behind the microwave that I’d forgotten I owned. I stood in the middle of my kitchen for a long moment before I taped the final box shut.
Tomorrow, I board a flight to Seattle and become someone else’s player.
Everything about it is simple on paper, which is probably why people love saying hockey is a business.
They say it like that should make it easier.
They say it like calling something a business strips away the years, the friendships, the routines, the quiet attachments that form when you’ve built your entire adult life around one city and one team.
The business side of hockey has always been straightforward. The emotional side gets stuck under your ribs and makes it hard to breathe.
The bartender tops off the drink in front of me before moving on to the next customer without a word, and I wrap my hand around the glass without lifting it. The ice has mostly melted. I haven’t been drinking so much as maintaining.
The funny thing is, Seattle is not a punishment.
Most players would celebrate this trade.
The Vipers are one of the best organizations in the league.
They are perennial playoff contenders, they sell out arenas night after night, and lately they have been pulling enough national attention to make headlines far beyond the sports world.
Between their captain, their co-captain, and the relationships that keep half the roster plastered across sports segments and entertainment sites every other week, people know the Seattle Vipers even if they have never watched a full hockey game in their lives.
It is one of those franchises that has managed to transcend the sport itself, which is either impressive or a sign of the times depending on how much patience you have for celebrity adjacency.
Every analyst talking about the trade seems convinced I have won some kind of lottery.
Maybe they are right. I should be, no, I am grateful. It still doesn’t change the fact that my entire life is boxed up and waiting to be reconstructed somewhere new, three thousand miles away.
My family is in New York. My parents are here.
My brother and sister are here. Every birthday, every holiday, and every last-minute Sunday dinner where my mother insists she only cooked enough for a few people and somehow ends up feeding half the neighborhood is here.
My entire adult life has been built around the quiet, reliable comfort of knowing that if I needed to see the people I loved, all I had to do was get in my car and drive.
Thirty minutes and I could be sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with something warm in front of me and the sound of my father’s voice coming from the other room.
Now I am supposed to live on the other side of the country and pretend it doesn’t feel like someone reached inside my chest and shifted something out of place.
I grew up close enough to the city that New York always felt like mine, even before hockey made it official.
The Guardians drafted me young, developed me through their system, and eventually called me up from the AHL before I’d had time to properly unpack half the boxes in my first apartment.
I spent years building a life inside that organization, learning how to survive the league, proving game by game and shift by shift that I belonged there, carving out a version of myself that could exist under that kind of pressure without falling apart.
New York was where I became a professional hockey player.
It’s where I became an adult. It’s the city that has seen nearly every version of me since I was twenty-three years old.
Somebody else will probably be sleeping in that apartment next month.
Parking in my spot, getting used to the floorboard creaks near the kitchen and which window sticks during the winter.
They will make it theirs the same way I made it mine, and I know that’s how it works. I know that. It still sucks.
Life moves whether you are ready for it or not.
My soul still aches from having to relay my news to my family.
My mother cried when I told her, and she tried so hard to pretend she wasn’t crying that it made me feel worse.
She kept clearing her throat and telling me Seattle was a wonderful opportunity, her voice getting thinner and more brittle every time she said the word opportunity, like she was testing how many times she could repeat it before it started to sound believable.
I couldn’t help but envision her pressing the backs of her fingers under her eyes between sentences.
I know exactly what she looks like when she does it.
My father took the news better, at least on the surface.
He shifted into practical mode almost immediately, the way he always does when he doesn’t want to talk about how he is actually feeling.
He asked about housing, travel, taxes, discussing the time difference and how it will affect our regular calls, and whether I needed him to fly out with me to help me get settled.
That was his version of saying he was worried without making it my responsibility to sit with his worry.
My father has always loved me by trying to solve things.
My siblings were less subtle.
My sister, Tazja, told me I was selfish for letting a hockey team kidnap me, her voice full of the particular outrage she reserves for things that genuinely upset her, then immediately pivoted to ask whether Seattle was a good place to open a business.
My younger brother, Jacques, announced that he would miss me for exactly one week before converting my old room into a home gym, which was such a transparent lie that I almost called him out on it directly.
He has had years to claim that room. He hasn’t lived with our parents in years, away at NYU.
He just wanted something to threaten me with. Spoiled brat.
I laughed when they said all of it, because I needed to laugh to keep myself from crying like a baby. I mean, I’m a grown ass man.