[football] this is the only thing i've been able to write the past week.
andriy still owns a house in Milan: London is too quick for him, all angles and business and a distinct lack of romanticism; Stamford Bridge too exposed, brash with its secrets. he feels the scrutiny sharply, excessively and intimately so, as if the English are scraping his skin off layer by layer and are each time disappointed with what they find underneath - or rather what they don’t. yet this, the constant suffocation, the promises to mourinho and deference to terry, the quick eyes and quicker hands of the journalists - this is preferable to the alternative: apathy. the fact that they keep watching, waiting, and dissecting implies a certain kind of faith. a belief that there is something they haven’t yet been privy to, some brilliance or youth to be dug up and torn, bleeding and brutal but victorious, from deep inside of him. the day they stop looking is the day they stop believing; the day they stop pulling, scratching, tearing, hurting him is the day it’s over. andriy is thirty. he has played football for almost twenty-five years. he is not ready.
some might deem it a masochistic sort of affair, this simultaneous revulsion and desire. andriy knows better.
*
when he leaves Milan, paolo wishes him luck with the same infinite grace with which he approaches diving Swedes, unwarranted red cards, and derby defeats. it is quite impressive, but then andriy remembers all the players he has said goodbye to in twenty years, the gods among them, and feels foolish for thinking that he might provoke anything out of the ordinary from the man. still, paolo makes it easier, and for that he is grateful. ricky takes his hand and says, may god be with you. he smiles: his face is young and untroubled in the way that only certainty can bring. this is the benefit of faith. in both paolo and ricky’s faces, nearly two decades apart, is an unmistakable absolute: you’re making a mistake. they don’t seem too troubled by this knowledge; the former has seen too many men do the very same to be moved, whereas the latter - andriy hopes that the certainty behind his eyes is not a certainty that andriy will return.
gattuso is angry, which is to be expected, really. mercenary, he tells andriy, you’re nothing but a mercenary. two months later, he receives an apologetic phone call that smells faintly of paolo’s persuasion; andriy is not always a forgiving man, but he’s the one who left, and so he laughs it off. rino means well, he always does, but this is why andriy detests it when football is compared to war. the ultimate battle, newspapers claim with audacious frequency. a general rallying his troops, political rhetoric and grand analogies, all that bullshit. it's an inviting temptation and he sees the appeal in the magnification of one match into some abstract heroics, but it leaves the tendons of his hands tense, his mouth twisted nonetheless. you might dislike everything about the soldier next to you, but you would never leave him. you would die next to him before you left him. that’s a kind of loyalty the football andriy knows, lives, doesn’t deserve. the friends one makes in football are fickle ones, and seven years evaporate into nothingness when touched by the heat of an eight digit transfer.
he knows what honor is. his father was a military man, and he raised his children to be people of values, principles, beliefs. the irony is too obvious to be ignored.
*
[insert, oh, another whole story here]
*
sheva looks desperate, a brittle sort of angry, and that’s not what he wants either, but it’s something - some honest distillation of feeling, and that’s more than he’s gotten out of sheva for a long time, now.
i thought you might understand, he’s saying, but you understand the least of all. don’t you get it? i’ve spent years trying to make you - i’m more than Ukraine, more than Chernobyl, more than a shirt and a number. i’m a man, and you can’t define me so easily, you can’t pity me with so little effort. i’ve spent my entire life trying to make myself but it always boils down to everything and everybody else in the end - i’m not andriy, i’m shevchenko from kiev, shevchenko running from the explosion, shevchenko chained by his wife, shevchenko -
liverpool pictures (lolz stevie g smacking someone named LUCIUS), graduation photos, excessive materialism, college, etc. to come.
PS.
LUIS GARCIA I MISS YOU :( and it hurts me to see you score goals for other clubs, but i hope you are happy. omg. :( this photo (may 2007, 'Paul Smith and Dave Robertson with Liverpool football legends at the 2007 Monaco Grand Prix, onboard the motor yacht Lady Anna of Fife.') made me ridiculously sad, actually. that smile. :(
but, uh, aljlsdjfl;jg those two men in the middle (no idea who they are?). that shirt. so gay, y/n.