Look Into The Past #1 [Eli]
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May 2022
There is something strange about coming back home for the first time, after leaving to make a home somewhere else.
I can't really put a name to it, but I can feel it lodged in my chest.
Brunson hasn't changed, of course it hasn't. A year means nothing in this type of town.
But we have changed.
Dean and I moved into an apartment in Calgary that could fit either one of our one-story childhood homes with still some room to spare. We got to know a new city - a bigger city - in a whole new country. We learned our place in a new team and bonded with new teammates.
And we have slowly gotten used to the different rhythm of a life of independence - physical, legal, financial. A life of private jets and team buses. Lunches with the team in decently priced restaurants, and ordering dinner in, and not having to pick between a new jacket or new jeans each winter. A life with press meetings and an agent to manage our time.
And while all of that was happening, Brunson has remained. As have all the faces that come with it.
The Millers receive us at the airport when we arrive - Dean's dad, his mom, and his brother Devin. They have wide grins and long embraces ready to welcome us back home.
Dean's dad drives us all into town in a cramped car and the Holmes family is waiting for us on their porch - Olie, Owen fresh off his own plane, and their parents. We all gather in the Holmes too-small living room to catch up.
Elliott said he'd be working, but I text him to let him know we landed.
The guys pick us up at Owen's parents' place after dinner, so we can go to The Lodge together.
Unlike what wiuld have happened a yewr ago, Olie tags along. At The Lodge, Trey sits with his arm around her, making jokes all night - loud, and unapologetically unchanged. Connor sits opposite him, interrupting every story with quippy comments to balance off Olie's wittier ones. Dean and James laugh. Owen mostly observes with a half-smile that looks secretly tired. And the whole thing transports me back to high school.
But this isn't the Brunson High cafeteria at lunch time. And we are not kids anymore.
Olie is graduating high school. Connor has his part-time at the resort's gift shop to help carry his own weight as his parents do their best to pay for school. Owen is juggling a part-time, a hockey scholarship, and a major in Business Analytics in a much bigger city nearly three thousand miles away from home.
James still has his parents to cushion his path, but he's in college too. And Trey is neither in school nor working, and he still has access to limitless funds from his parents, but he has moved out of his family home into an apartment in the nice building complexes in Lake City.
And then there's me and Dean. We are now rent-payers, pro athletes, bank account-owners. We clean our dishes, and iron our clothes, and vacuum our apartment. It doesn't feel exactly like the kind of adulthood our parents promised, but it's not high school either.
Back home, though, it feel all disconnected. Away from the press meetings, and our agent, and the older teammates, the image of independence we conquered feels less real. Like we were just playing pretend. And I'm not sure if I can still pretend surrounded by the people who were brought up with me.
Watching Dean come up from a sip of hot chocolate with a familiar foam-tache tells me he's not even trying.
Seeing Liam across the room makes the whole issue fade into a hiccup in my head.
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