What We Saw by Hartzler,Aaron
one
THIS VIDEO DOESN’T show you everything.
For instance, you can’t tell that it’s been raining or that the grass is still wet beneath our cleats. I’m five years old in the shaky footage, which was shot before you could make a video using your phone. I pull out Dad’s old camera every once in a while and watch my first game. This tape from twelve years ago is always inside when I do. Nobody else has used this weird little machine with the flip-out screen for a long time. Back then, Dad says every gadget had a single purpose: Phones were for making calls, video cameras were for shooting videos.
Soccer games were for making friends. At least that’s what Mom said to me when she French-braided my hair the morning this video was made. I was nervous because it was my first game, and I wanted to do a good job.
“I don’t want to mess up,” I told her.
“It’s okay if you mess up,” she said. “Everybody does. All you can do is try your best.”
I told Mom that Ben didn’t ever mess up. She asked who Ben was as she twisted an elastic onto the end of my braid.
“My friend.”
You never see Dad on-screen, but his is the only voice you can hear clearly most of the time. He was holding the video camera in one hand and an umbrella in the other. You can’t see Will, either, but you can hear him fussing in Mom’s arms every time Dad stops shouting.
My father yelled himself hoarse that morning: “Hustle, Kate!” “Atta girl!” He cheered me on while I did what five-year-olds playing soccer tend to do: chase the ball around the field in a giant herd. All the good intentions and sideline instructions from the coach to “play your position” and “hang back” are no match for the thrill of seeing the ball bounce your way, the hope for a clear shot, the rush of true connection.
The moment when Ben breaks away from the pack with the ball still makes me smile. He was a couple inches shorter than I was back then. He didn’t pass me up until the summer before seventh grade. As he taps the ball out ahead, I turn on the speed and run at his heels, just the two of us leaving the group, my braid flying behind us. Dad yells his head off behind the camera and the picture bounces wildly as he jumps up and down, then remembers he’s filming this and zooms in on us.
If you look closely, you can see Ben’s tongue sticking out of his mouth slightly, pressed against his lower lip, his forehead wrinkled in concentration as he exhibits the early makings of a great athlete: control, stamina, dexterity. Of course, he’s only five years old. This brief glimpse of what Ben will one day be goes down in flames as the ball hits a bump in the field, bounces up against his knee, and trips him. Not a major error, but he goes down hard. His feet were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I pause the playback at this point and wish that all of life could work the way this camera does.
Sometimes, things happen too fast.
On the screen, my five-year-old self is frozen in midstride, right foot raised. My body is still running as my brain attempts to adjust to the fact that Ben isn’t where I saw him just a moment ago. In the next few frames, I’ll scramble. I’ll fight to stay upright. I push play and watch as young me tries to adjust, to not hurt Ben, attempting to keep my feet beneath me and avoid a collision.
Even now it makes my stomach drop when I see my right cleat clip Ben in the back of the head. I’ll never forget that feeling, wheeling around and seeing the small stream of red trailing down the skin behind his left ear. I didn’t do any major damage—just a cut near his hairline—but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew is I had kicked my friend in the head, and now he was bleeding. A couple of stitches fixed it right up. You can barely see the scar now.
Unless you know where to look, you’ll miss it completely.
As Dad runs toward me on the field, the sky and ground bounce back and forth across the frame. The picture goes still as he lays the camera in the grass. You can see a few blades of green and a wide patch of blue sky, the lens telescoping in and out as it attempts to focus on the goal and net beyond.
You can’t see it on the tape, but Ben didn’t shed a single tear. I was the one crying. “I hurt my friend. I hurt my friend.” I say this over and over again.
Sobbing into my father’s shoulder, I felt a hand on my back. It was Ben. Suddenly, his mother was there. Coaches and teammates surrounded us. His forehead was creased once more, but this time because he was worried about me. The camera picked up his voice. Over my sobs, you can hear him saying, “It’s okay. It’s going to be fine.”