We arrived in the middle of this country in the middle of the night. Our team’s private plane descended through thick layers of dark storm clouds momentarily lit up by white flashes of lightning, until the rubber tires kissed the wet American asphalt.

I was one of 22 players from the national team on the flight, accompanied by an entourage of coaches, managers, physical therapists, and publicists. The delegation had traveled all day and crossed two continents to land in this mid-sized midwestern American city. The belly button of the northern giant. It would be our home base for the next forty days. We were the first team to arrive in the city that would host the first match of the World Cup.

As the plane rolled toward the gate, I closed my stinging eyes and rolled my stiff neck in one direction, then the other, trying to loosen the knot near my left scapula. Then I lifted my heels up and down 50 times and rolled a tennis ball up and down each thigh. Across the aisle, Number 10 was in the same sleeping position he had taken when the plane took off 10 hours ago. He was probably dreaming of scoring the penalty kick that would win us the cup. He could dream of glory. He was only 23. I can’t sleep on planes. It’s one of my shortcomings, in addition to my age and injuries.

We were all golden boys in our hometowns. Since we were old enough to walk, we learned how to play. We listened when adults told us we had a special gift. We had all earned our national jerseys. We knew the taste of blood in our mouths, the sting of a scraped knee, the smell of the freshly cut grass on the field, the particular stench of overtime sweat, and the sweet chorus of thousands of fans chanting our team song. We had logged infinite hours of workouts and practice matches to get here. It would be my third World Cup, my second as the captain of the team, and the last of my career.

Some say that I’m a better player for the club team in Europe, where I don’t have the pressure of my country weighing on my aging shoulders. The stakes are higher when I put on the national jersey. I know what it means to my country; to the children playing in concrete lots without goal posts, the multigenerational families sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on their living room couch holding their breath, the fans in the neighborhood cantina shouting at the referee through the TV and dancing to rejoice when we score a goal.

The religion of soccer in our country was created match by match. The athletes on the national team took on biblical proportions through the stories of matches against Goliath teams, during plagues of misfortunate management, torrential rains, and oppressive heat. Playing under that banner was sacred and the World Cup was the holiest of events. When we played well, the country worshipped me like a saint. When we lost, they vilified me. I’ve never gotten my team a World Cup win. The closest I came was the quarterfinals eight years ago. I was at my peak back then.

During the northward flight, I did nothing but watch the virtual map of the flight on the screen in front of me. I fell into a trance imagining what we were flying over. We flew over mountain ranges, deserts, plains, rivers, rainforests, metropolises, and villages. We flew over the earth, rich with salt, lithium, copper and over fruit trees heavy with guayabas, mameys, and chirimoyas. We flew over the piranhas, alpacas, capibaras, and condors; over the libraries stocked with Borges, Neruda, Lispector and Garcia Marquez.

We flew over the young couple making out on the malecon, the engineer on the metro commute, the octogenarian woman peeling potatoes for a chicken stew, the soldiers in fatigues hiding in the mountain foliage. We flew over the graves of the victims of forced disappearances, narcoterrorism, and military dictatorships.

We flew over my family and friends and acquaintances, and over the spirit of my grandparents, and my great-grandparents. We flew over the stadium where I’d grown up watching the national team, dreaming about being like them, just like a million other little kids. We flew over the grassy yard where I’d learned to play the beautiful game as a wobbling toddler. We flew over the beating heart of a country; a sport I love so much that I’ve let it break my body slowly over the last two decades.

When we filed out of the airplane, we passed under a large red, white and blue heart-shaped arch after exiting the jet bridge that read, “Welcome to the heart of America. The heart of the game.” We were greeted by five members of the delegation who had arrived a few days earlier to handle logistics for our stay: ensuring the catering company could make our specialized meal plans, checking that the hotel had made the beds with goose down pillows and Egyptian cotton sheets, and going over the security protocols with the hired bodyguards.

These were necessary precautions – we were celebrities back home. Last year, an ardent follower of our team climbed two fences and hammered his way through a wooden barricade to get into a match against our rival team because tickets had sold out. The fervor of our fans was no longer a shock to me; this anticlimactic welcome was disorienting.

Once we arrived at the hotel, I drew a hot bath and tossed some epsom salt in the tub. I gripped the edges of the tub and lowered my triceps slowly as I dunked my 36-year-old body into the warm, effervescent lavender-scented water. My muscles started to relax as the water continued to fill the tub, but my mind felt heavy. I went through memories of my two-decade career like tossing bronze coins into a fountain. I don’t know if I was wishing for something or letting something go.

When I was on the sub-18 national team, I’d already been playing for more than a decade, but I was still green. The nights before matches, I would go to bars in the zona rosa with the friends I’d always known, where we would drink cheap calimochos and dance salsa with pretty girls from the Catholic university. We laughed too loudly and yelled out stupid nicknames in the violet morning hours when we made our way home from the discotheque to our residential neighborhoods. I would come home and drink powdered Milo dissolved in hot milk and munch on cheesy yuca bread to soak up the alcohol. After a cold shower, I would put on my training gear and pull back my shoulder-length black hair into a slick bun. I was good as new. I flew across the field like a leopard and jumped up with a closed fist punching the air anytime I scored a goal. I recovered swiftly from injuries. My body was limber and light. I was boundless.

I once bought a chinchilla from a pet store and set it loose in the locker room right after a grueling practice. These sorts of practical jokes were my way of softening the edges of a severe, monastic training period under a particularly strict coach. After setting the chinchilla loose from its cage, I whistled to get my teammates’ attention. I told them I was watching two pet chinchillas for my kid sister and that I couldn’t lose them or she’d kill me. A few players grimaced and jumped onto the benches, grasping their towels and scanning the surface of the floor for the rodent. The others stood against the lockers laughing raucously and pointing as they watched a grey ball of fur scurrying around towels, sweaty clothes, and cleats. Two of my closest friends on the team got down on all fours to look for the missing chinchilla that didn’t exist.

My coach came into the locker room and watched the mayhem unfold, arms crossed sternly across his chest. When one of the players told him about the loose chinchilla, he sighed and looked directly at me, the youngest on the team. I contained nervous laughter behind a thinly veiled false serious expression. In his parental voice of permanent disappointment, the same one I still hear in my head before every match, he said, “Your raw talent won’t be enough forever.” My teammates stopped laughing. “Everyone put on your gear again, we have another hour of practice thanks to your chinchilla friend.” The creature was burrowing into an open duffel bag, burying its little head in a pile of clothes. My teammates started calling me Chinchilla that day. It’s still the name on the back of my jersey. Most people think the namesake comes from the way I weave in between players – agile, quick, squirrelly – before they even notice I’ve stolen the ball.

I woke up feeling jet-lagged, though the time zone hadn’t changed. I put on my comfortable sneakers and headed down to the lobby. When the elevator doors opened, I was greeted by a life-sized poster of me. I was smiling widely with a soccer ball under my foot. The rest of the lobby was decked out in large banners with our team’s colors. Most of the team was already at breakfast, piling their plates with the calories they would need for the first of seven training sessions before the first game. I wasn’t hungry, but I served myself a large plate of scrambled egg whites and sliced turkey breast and sat down at the long table next to the coach.

“Keep them excited,” he whispered to me as he looked around the table at the players, who were jovially having conversations in between bites.

“We need their energy to stay high until the first match. Don’t let them burn out, capitan.” I nodded quickly and stood up. The table turned to look at me when I whistled loudly. “Familia! We’re finally here. For some of us, it’s our first World Cup, for some of us it’s our last. Let’s give it everything we have. Let’s leave it all on the field,” There was applause and cheers and fraternal pats on the back, but my mind was elsewhere. I was remembering when I’d joined the men’s national team. I’d scored two goals and a penalty kick that won an important game. It put me on the map. During the press conference after the game, I felt my fear of public speaking evaporate. The words came spilling out of my mouth like water. I didn’t have to think; like language was an extension of my brain-body connection with soccer.

Ten days passed by in a blur. The first night, we went to the city riverfront, which we’d heard was the spot for nightlife in this town. We expected the streets to be full of fans getting fired up for the tournament. We took two bodyguards with us, just in case. When we arrived at the boardwalk, we saw flags and World Cup signs everywhere we looked – at the 1950s-style diner, the sushi restaurant and the brewery with the rooftop terrace. But we seemed to go unnoticed. No one rushed up to us asking to take their picture with them. We didn’t see anyone gasp or point at us from a distance. No one chanted the national team’s song.

The World Cup usually felt like an explosive chain reaction, the energy growing more frenetic, contagious and powerful with every match. But this time, I had the sense that we were alone in this city. Like the World Cup had somehow emptied it of real life, like a bare stage before a play. Our routine was the same for the next nine days: wake up call at 6 am, breakfast in the hotel, and shuttle to the university campus pitch to train for five hours. After practice in the afternoon, the sky was heavy with threatening, yellowish-grey clouds as we were shuttled back to the hotel on the highway.

The night before the first game, my stomach was in knots. My wife, her parents, and my daughter had arrived the night before. They were all staying together in a rented apartment on the other side of the city. It was standard practice for our families to stay in a separate location to help us stay focused; it was one of the many sacrifices we made at this level. We all met at a steakhouse downtown on the eve of the first game to celebrate the start of the cup. I was grieving.

“How do you like your steak, sir?” The waiter asked me at dinner. “Well done, please.” My wife looked at me in disbelief, then concern. “You’ve always ordered your steak rare. What’s gotten into you?” I wasn’t sure why I’d ordered it that way. I guess I’d forgotten what I liked. My preferences and desires had always been so tied to this sport. I was 30 days away from losing it, and maybe losing myself. The waiter watched me expectantly as a look of recognition washed over his face.

“Are you – ” I cut him off. “Yes, I am,” I straightened up in the booth. Finally, someone recognized me in this town. “Sir, are you sure you want it well done?” He said. “I like it that way too but everyone here makes fun of me for it,” he smiled sheepishly.

I ate the dry, tough steak slowly, and washed it down with a glass of water, while my family shared a bottle of Malbec and a tiramisu. “We’re all so proud of you,” my wife held my hand, and my three-year-old daughter sat on my lap. I kissed and hugged them tightly in the parking lot of the restaurant before they drove to their apartment, and I went back to the hotel alone.

That night, I had a nightmare. I was driving on an endless highway, grey and wide with at least a dozen lanes congested with cars. I was driving, but I didn’t know where I was going. When I looked in the rearview mirror to try to merge into another lane, I caught a glimpse of my reflection. My skin was leathery and wrinkled, and my silver hair was past my shoulders. In my peripheral vision, I saw that I was wearing a jersey, but it wasn’t the right colors. I wanted to take it off, but I couldn’t take my hands off the wheel. I kept merging into different lanes, trying to find an exit ramp, but the highway was endless. Then I heard an explosion, and woke up drenched in sweat.

The explosion was thunder. It was pouring outside. It had rained almost every day that week during our practice sessions, but never this hard. I looked at my phone. The game was in seven hours. The rain would stop by then, I thought. I put on my sweat suit with the little flag over the heart, and sat on the living room floor to stretch my hamstrings. Then I heard a low howl grow louder until it sounded like a feral animal yowling in pain. Out of pure instinct, I looked for a wild creature in my room, as the howling got louder and transformed into a deafening roar.

I got down on all fours, scurried quickly under a wooden table, and covered my head with my arms. Something was flying directly over the hotel, over my room, over the table, over me. When the bellowing subsided, I opened my eyes and crawled out from under the table on my hands and knees. The windows of the hotel room were gone. Had we been bombed? Was it a shooting? Was I becoming some kind of American statistic?

I stood up, lightheaded, and looked for my phone on the nightstand. I wanted to call my wife. Before I could call, the phone started buzzing in my hand. An alert popped up on the screen: Severe weather hazard: tornado.

I ran out of the hotel room down the hall and knocked on the coach’s room. He opened the door immediately with a panicked look on his face, like when we’re one goal down with a minute left on the clock. We ran down the hall and started knocking on all the doors, yelling the names of the players, asking if everyone was ok. It wasn’t until I’d knocked on the last door that I realized I was barefoot.

I felt sharp needles in my feet, knees and palms, like a million tiny bees had stung me. I lifted my right foot, my knee at hip height, and turned my foot in toward me. There were tiny shards of glass stuck to my naked foot, and on my hands and knees. I hadn’t realized that I was crawling on broken glass after the tornado shattered the windows in my room. I lost my balance, and coach put my arm around his neck, and asked the other players to help me as I limped to the nearest room before I blacked out.

Out of precaution, the match was rescheduled for the following day to make sure the stadium had not suffered any damage from the weather. I spent the rest of the morning in a clinic as a kind middle-aged nurse patiently removed the pieces of glass in my feet with thin metal tweezers, cleaned the wounds, and dressed my champion feet in gauze. She had no idea who I was, but she treated me like a son and called me “young man.” I was.

I put on my jersey carefully with my gauze-wrapped hands the next day. I looked in the mirror at the bandages on my knees and shins. I’d finally broken into a thousand pieces. I knew immediately that I wouldn’t be able to play today, maybe I’d be out for the rest of the tournament. It was over. Fate had taken me out of the game 30 days too early. But I would watch my team play with my heart full, knowing I’d already given it all I could. I’d left it all on the field. I put my hair in a bun. Good as new.

***

Daniela Guzmán Peña is a Colombian-American writer based in San Francisco.