At the end of the first episode, when quarterback Jason Street goes down, Coach Taylor gives the first of his trademark speeches. Something about life being so very fragile. Something about us all being vulnerable. Something about how, at some point in our lives, we will fall. “We will all fall.”
I’ve never played football or any kind of team sport. I’ve never sat through a coach’s halftime pep talk. I’ve never been in the room with someone rallying the troops to turn the tide of the fight. But hearing Coach Taylor speak, I prop myself up on my elbows. I am forty-two. This is the halftime of my life, and my team is losing. I’ve never been more in need of this speech.
He continues about how what we have can be taken from us. Even what we have that is special. And when it is taken, we will be tested.
I’m captivated by this speech, and even though I’ve heard it before, even though I own it on Blu-ray, I’m also hearing it for the very first time. It is in this pain that we are tested. Since I am in this pain, the pain of having what is special taken from me, I look inside myself and I don’t like what I see: a man who is broken and alone. I think of all the time Lily and I spent together, just the two of us — the talks about boys, the Monopoly, the movies, the pizza nights — and I wonder how much of it was real. Dogs don’t eat pizza; dogs don’t play Monopoly. I know this on some level, but everything feels so true. How much of it was an elaborate construct to mask my own loneliness? How much of it was built to convince myself the attempts I made at real life — therapy, dating — were not just that: attempts?
Somewhere, sometime, I stopped really living. I stopped really trying. And I don’t understand why. I had done all the right things. I had Lily. I had Jeffrey. I had a family.
And then I didn’t.
I don’t understand how my life got so empty, or why the octopus came, or why everyone eventually goes away.
Lily and the Octopus, P274-275
Steven Rowley
ISBN 978-1-5011-2622-2
