#malcom spence

ps i'm still stuck on misa graveyard full of dead friends thing. youth hockey caught red-handed

eyebrow emoji anon!! i'm blushing!!! nobody's ever assigned themselves an emoji in my inbox before!! this is so exciting!!

and (taking a big breath here, exhaling, inhaling again) i've also still been thinking about michael misa walking around in his graveyard of dead friends. he’s kinda like the groundskeeper if i think about it too hard, the weird kind who sometimes ignores the bones rattling, and then sometimes digs people up and stares them right in their dead faces and sometimes even checks them into the boards. and it’s not like michael killed them himself. like you said, it’s just the scythe of youth hockey, pulling more and more childhood buddies beyond the veil.

most of the guys still exist in his phone, and they post their end of season highlights, which mis likes and moves on from. memorials, he thinks. some of them send texts that make it through the fog, usually in april, because they play on chronically bottom 8 teams. they say “bro we gotta catch up" and they probably mean it and mike also means it, if he remembers to text back. and this is all possible because they aren’t really dead, they’re in michigan and philly and ugh, calgary.

despite all this grief, misa doesn’t have abandonment issues. not anymore at least. hardly hurts to see these guys when they pop their heads outta the dirt because misa has his routines, and if you're not in them, you're not really... y'know. he’s usually got one guy at a time, is all. one guy who drives him around, who knows how to make his favorite smoothie, who texts him from the other bed in the hotel room instead of saying the weird thing out loud. and then hockey does what it does, takes the person and keeps the hole they left.

i have to talk about malcom spence. and i'm sorry for that. @castratecapuchin said it best with "malcom spence is the the dead body of all time."

the hole is undoubtedly spence shaped.

spence who knew mike when he was just some kid with a bauer duffle bag bigger than his body.

who liked when mike would rattle off stats to him and show off his hockey card collection.

who mike made out with when making out didn’t even have a name yet.

who knew he was never quite as good, never quite as accurate as misa but called him his best friend anyway.

who misa described as the best player (in the series between saginaw and the otters, 2025 ohl postseason.)

who felt like the world was ending when he got drafted early in the 2nd round to the rangers and misa went 2nd ova to the sharks. who couldn't even celebrate that night, went straight back to his hotel room. went to umich with the hopes that one day he'd be an nhler too.

zayne is different, obviously. he's still there, like a statue at the end of a dark hallway that mike could find, even with his eyes covered. i haven't thought too hard about this one but i will if someone puts a gun to my head.

i don't think about mistone very often because porter martone isn't dead at all, he texts misa at 11:30pm whenever the sharks play the flyers, and randomly throughout the summer, only at night time though. u up? misa ignores it, has better dick on speed dial. sometimes he sends marty pictures of sam, probably sam, dark buzzed hair, between his thighs and marty gets bricked up but refuses to reply. not because he's mad misa's fucking a knight, he'd Very Obviously cross that line too. he's just jealous, gotta find something vaugely misa-like to jerk off to. (i'm sorry if anyone was harmed by my characterization of porter martone. i don't know what to tell you)

don't ask me about how william eklund fits into all this. i'm not ready to talk about it. come back in a few months.

sam isn't a replacement for some dead friend. he's the final girl, impossible to bury. he makes himself big and fits into that spence shaped hole, stretches it even, makes room for himself to get comfy. force of nature. guy who gets kicked out of the london knights group chat enough to know everything is temporary until you decide that it isn't. he fucks with michael's schedule and then somehow becomes the schedule. keeps coming back loud and alive and irritating. it feels like every time mike tries to turn him into a future memory, sam is already there in the present tense going, “what's wrong with your face? did you take your vitamins? eat something.”