Actions speak louder than words

“Do you remember pizza and french-fries?” Kolton, my boyfriend, asks me. He’d said ‘I love you’ for the first time just a week ago, and it felt like the crowning jewel to our three months together.

“Yes, but not very well,” I tell him. I used to ski when I was six, complete with neon yellow ninja-turtle skis that seemed to glow as they glided on top of the snow, but I hadn’t been in fifteen years and had forgotten everything but the name of those two stances.

It was Friday January thirteenth, my older brother Auston’s birthday, and a day I had been planning for since the beginning of the year. I’d be taking him skiing that evening after we finished our college classes that day.

I slide to the front of my seat as the lift carries us to the top of the slope, and we slide down the ramp onto the slushy, sun-melted snow lit by the overhead light poles for night-skiing. We turn to the right and I shuffle the heavy boots clamped onto my feet to face my skis towards long treacherous plunge of the bunny-hill. Kolton stands a few feet lower on the hill, his back to the slope and the ends of his skis crossed to keep himself from sliding.

“Follow me,” he says, and begins to slide very slowly backwards. I do, my skis in the largest ‘pizza’ wedge. The wider the triangle, the slower you slide, and I do not want to go fast.

“Good!” Kolton says, and I follow him for three turns as we weave back and forth across the icy snow. “Now try it with your skis apart.” He turns his back to me and weaves down the hill french-fries style, his skis parallel as he sways his way down the mountainside. Just seconds later, he’s two-thirds of the way down the mountain. Some ski instructor he was, leaving me stranded and unprepared. He even worked at this resort, he should know better than to ditch a novice. I space my skis apart and try to mimic him.

My slow slide quickly gains speed, and I’m racing towards the trees on the left side of the clearing. My mind races my skis for a way to stop, and instinct tells me to fall. I let my knees buckle as I tip to my left, but my right knee, weighed down by the boot and ski, is forced around my left ski at an unnatural angle. A chorus of crackles and pops tell me something is seriously wrong.

I push myself upright—or I start to at least—when a sharp pain jolts through my knee at the start of pressure. Gasping, I fall back against the icy snow and clench my teeth until the brunt of the pain passes. My first thought was that I had to get down the mountain, so I sit up and grab the nose of my ski and one at time, turn them over as I turn my hips so I wouldn’t be putting any pressure on my messed-up knee. Now that I’m lying on my right side, I carefully stand up on my left leg. I start to slide down the mountain again, only butting the barest pressure on my messed-up right leg, but I slowly find myself drifting to the far side of the hill. I’d have to turn before I ran into the trees, but that meant leaning on my right ski. I risk trying to turn just feet from the tree line and instantly regret it. Pain shoots up like an angry fire, and I buckle, hitting the snow hard. This time Kolton sees me collapse, and he starts hiking up the kill sideways on his skis. A few scared tears escape my eyes as I force my boots out of my skis, and I clip them together before carefully feeling my knee through my snow pants. Everything seems in place, but it already feels hot, swollen and tender.

“What happened?” Kolton asks, falling to his knees just a few feet down from me.

“I think it’s dislocated,” I say as much to him as to myself. Why else would it have popped so loudly?

“Well, what should we do?” He asks. Some Eagle scout he is. I was supposed to be the scared one asking what to do, not the other way around.

I slowly stand on one leg and clutch my skis like a walking stick as I try to take a step forward. The same pain shoots, and I collapse once again. There was no chance I would be walking down. I stick my leg in front of me and scoot forward a foot or two, like some strange variation of the crab crawl.

“ Race you to the bottom,” I joke as I look down the hundreds of feet of slope left. It’d take an hour to slide down the hill a foot at a time. I look up when I see movement and watch the backside of Kolton skis down the mountain, leaving me stranded alone, unable to walk, in the icy slush of a midnight mountainside.

Seven scars later I can now walk again, but his “I love you” never held any weight.