This is My Message to You

Purple

PURPLE

Spring of junior year.

Soccer Sectionals. Two more games to win to get a shot at state champions.

I can't think of anything else when I picture junior year because this one day, this two-second moment, changed every plan I'd made in the beginning of my college search.

My grades were decent. I was involved in random clubs. Plenty of people told me that I could get in a handful of pretty good schools if I put some work into the application essays, and my parents tried to nudge me to look at some Ivy Leagues – "it doesn't hurt to try, after all." But I didn't care much about the name of the school I attended; all I wanted was soccer.

"You can start looking around at some D2 options," my coach would tell me. "And I can try and get a couple scouts up here from smaller D1 schools, but I'm not sure how much money we would be talking."

That was okay by me, as long as I could play in college.

And then the game.

Rain. Lots of rain. And mud and slippery grass and sweat running down my face and my breath rattling in my chest from a bout of bronchitis that hit just before Sectionals. I can picture so clearly where I was: I had the ball, saw the opening in the goal, knew we needed that shot to tie the game – it's what happened next that I can't understand no matter how many sleepless nights I've spent trying relive it.

But somehow: Lying in a slosh of mud. Pain ricocheting through my leg. My vision as splotchy as the grey rain clouds. The ball nowhere near me, stolen away by a defender.

Get it back.

That was my one clear thought. We needed that shot.

My brain told my legs to stand up, but the second I lifted my head, I saw my knee bent at a horrible angle against the muddy grass. As I tried to move, pain shot through my entire lower body, and I threw up all over my royal blue soccer uniform.

The hospital told me everything that I'd torn in my knee when I fell – ACL, PCL, every-fucking-letter-CL, I don't know – but all I really heard was the length of recovery and therapy time and that awful, awful sentence, "I don't know if you'll be able to keep playing."

I spent twenty-four hours in the hospital drugged to my toes in morphine, which I appreciated because it meant that I couldn't think. That might have been the first time that I realize how nice it was sometimes to just not think. Just stare at a white, white ceiling until the blackness washes over you and you sleep forever.

My parents knew what soccer meant to me and did their best to give me space after they helped me get comfortable on the living room couch at home. They only stopped in every once in a while.

"Riley, dear, Grace is here with some of your homework –"

"Do you want soup? I made chicken noodle."

"Let me change your ice pack..."

After a couple days, I gave walking a try. My knee, swollen to twice its normal size still, didn't think much of that idea, but I had a summer soccer league starting in a month and didn't have time to mess around. Forced to resort to crutches, I hobbled my way from the living room to the back porch because the temperature had hit seventy for the first time that spring and I was not going to miss out on the first warm spring evening.

Even that tiny distance hurt like a bitch. I basically collapsed on the porch steps, the crutches clattering down next to me as I just sat there and wondered how just a few days previously I could run five miles without breathing hard.