1500 words of sam dickinson trying to make sense of it all
sam dickinson is a martyr to his own desire. he wants and wants and wants, but somewhere along the way, it was put into his head that wanting only matters when the result is picture perfect. you can’t want the tan, fluffy haired boy because you gotta marry a hot blond with perfect tits. you can’t drive him around and let him burrow into you while binge prison break on the couch because you gotta leave her house at 2am knowing you won’t remember her name in a few days. it’s like, all part of some greater plan with a lot of missing puzzle pieces. and sam, as a challenge to how everyone thinks he’s so bullheaded and immovable, dumbly goes “makes sense” even though it makes no fucking sense at all. he doesn’t want a wife, he doesn’t want the girl blowing up his dms, still it makes sense that he should, so he does.
same same for puck; you can’t lie around playing video games all day, you gotta make it to the show. it doesn’t matter that you used to think about hiding your skates behind a pile of lawn chairs in the garage or, on your most bitchy, melodramatic days, severing your achilles tendon. it doesn’t matter that your favorite part of hockey has almost always been the room, the bros, the jokes, the way you fits in so easily, quickwitted jester among friends. sam didn’t do it for the love of the game, but his coaches encouraged him and his dad kept talking about what a waste it would be if he stopped, which is a pretty effective thing to say to a kid whose whole deal is that he would rather die than let somebody think he couldn’t do something. so sam didn’t stop. then he got better. then being good became being great became having something enormous and glittering laid out in front of him, and now he wants it so badly he can hardly look directly at the possibility of losing it.
this makes sense too, somehow. the fact that he never wanted to start has no bearing on the fact that he cannot stop. these are different departments. nobody has to reconcile them. michael misa is a whole different problem though.
sam has wanted people before. girls, obviously. hot ones. Blonde ones, mostly, although that might be confirmation bias or ontario or falling in line. girls he could want in the correct way, for the correct amount of time, and then leave behind without the wanting contaminating the rest of his day. there was no follow-up material. no urge to know what they ate for breakfast, or whether they thought his no look through the legs wrist shot was cool, or why they had gone quiet in the middle of a sentence. ssam didn’t need to keep a running inventory of their moods. he didn’t sit in traffic thinking about something they had said three days earlier and suddenly understand it wrong, then right, then wrong again.
misa is different: different how, different where, different enough that sam already knows every soft place on his body and which ones make him twitch away laughing before he gives in. different in a way that’s somehow tied to the hockey of it all. different enough that sam does know what he wants for breakfast, knows when he’s sleep by how mean he gets, knows the tiny change in his voice when he wants sam to stop fucking around and pay attention. he knows how misa folds himself into the passenger seat, one knee up, sock sliding halfway off his heel. ge knows how he goes boneless on the couch after midnight and ends up half on top of sam without either of them discussing it. sam has collected all this information accidentally, supposedly, and still wants more with the grim urgency of somebody studying for a test worth all of his grade.
he wants to know what misa is going to say before he says it. he wants to know what Misa is too embarrassed to ask for and what he only pretends to be embarrassed about. hje wants to be the person Misa calls, which is already true, so then he wants to be the first person misa calls, which might also already be true, and so he wants it to be true forever. he wants to give misa whatever he wants, including the freaky shit sam would have sworn, sincerely, was not his scene. maybe it still isn’t. maybe doing it, liking it, and spending the next afternoon thinking about how to do it better are all only for and because of mis.
when sam was fourteen, his dad put a framed photo in his lap. sam’s whole family was there; jack and his parents and him, 10 years old in goalie pads that made him look 2x bigger, standing rinkside where sam played squirt. he was holding a silver-coloured medal because his team had almost won some tourney. sam remembers not even knowing why he was there. anyway, this picture. steve gives it to him and then pats him on the shoulder all paternally, goes, “you’re gonna have this one day, same picture, but your son’s gonna win gold.”
so yeah, sam knows what the picture of his future is supposed to look like. a wife, a stanley cup win, a white picket fence. he’s supposed to buy his parents a vacation home and have sons who’re better and more dedicated than he was. he’s supposed to hold misa at an arm’s length, only texting him when something funny is happening in the groupchat. but that’s not the picture he wants. he wants to hold mis closer. sam can hardly even look at the picture his dad gave him because every future worth imagining has misa right beside sam, and maybe they win a stanley cup, and maybe he does buy a cottage in muskoka for his parents, but the other stuff is only appealing to some version of sam that’s built on a pile of lies.
this sam doesn’t lie. he doesn’t. he’s blunt with it, he can explain what he wants or refuse to, but won’t give it up. he can say no or fuck off and dig his heels in. he plays hockey because he wants to win, not because he should. he fucks women because he… wants to, but he also wants misa, and so he has him too. or maybe it’s the other away around. the awareness that sam would give up a lot to keep michael misa is kinda shocking, lands like burnt dinner on stove, setting off the shrill ring of the fire alarm.
okay, well, this sam is stubborn. he takes whatever is handed to him and grips it so hard that nobody can take it back. he keeps playing until hockey becomes the thing he wants most. he keeps insisting he’s not into dudes while learning misa’s body with more focus than he’s ever devoted to anything because what’s the point if he can’t make mis feel good. he keeps calling himself normal and then builds his entire life around one boy in increasingly specific increments.
these facts do not arrive like a revelation. they mostly show up, unwelcome, while he’s doing other things. brushing his teeth and staring at how misa’s facewash is sitting on the sink. driving to practice with one of misa’s hoodies in the back seat. lying awake because mia been his usual, entirely too earnest self at dinner and it always floors sam how he skips past it like a rock skipping over water. “i like when you pick for me,” he’d said, putting the menu down. sam notices the evidence piling up and then keeps moving, because there is always somewhere to be. a morning skate. a sesh with the trainers. misa’s place. some girl’s name lighting up his phone while he is already halfway across town because misa said he needed something and refused to elaborate over text.
it occurs to sam, sometimes, that the life he thinks he wants might mostly be a collection of things that made sense to other people first. the girls. the hockey. the wife who exists in theory and actually looks like michael misa burning lasagna in their shared kitchen. maybe sam has spent years mistaking inevitability for preference. maybe he is not bullheaded and stubborn so much as extremely committed once somebody points him in a direction, which is definitely less flattering, in a way. if you get it.
then again, hockey belongs to him now. whatever it was before, a directive from his dad, an obligation, it’s his. the want is real enough to hurt. same is true for misa, only stings worse, because he can’t just leave misa at the rink. he’s in sam’s bed and stealing his hoodies and asking sam to bruise him in ways that make his entire understanding of himself briefly blue-screen before he does them anyway. the fact that those wants came to him sideways does not make them smaller. it only means sam has no idea which ones he chose and which ones chose him, or whether there is even a difference after you have organized your whole life around them.