All the worlds outside an arena

“Ciao, Katie!”

It was one of the thrills of my winter, hearing the Italian doctor burst so brightly with my name from his university’s office in a town outside Venice, a city that sits snug between two rivers that twine down from the Alps, a mess of swirling arcaded streets and cypress trees ribboned with mist, hanging low over ancient amphitheatre walls. I know because I’d Google imaged the place extensively in the string of days we went back and forth trying to figure out the best place to meet in the middle of our timezones.

The conversation revolved around tendons. The musculature of pro athletes. Literally the least likely thing to set against that kind of scenery but through it, still, how we lilted and rambled and I kept seeing the late evening sun flicker against the stone wall behind him, transportive.

I mean, you’re right if you read that and thought, “You’re reaching”. Because absolutely, I am.

I miss so much what it means to travel. Even the desert dry vacuumed out of moisture feeling your body gets after a flight. But the deeper layer to that, when I think about it, which has been often lately, are all the places I’ve watched basketball set against. How at the time the place seemed secondary, a backdrop, but now when I remember it I’m straining for all the sensory elements I smudged over.

A few times at Staples Center, one night getting thrust at the entry gate a big mesh Clippers beach bag I have folded pristine in my closet and have never once used, dutifully accepting it with fingers still greasy from carnitas we’d scarfed at a taco truck on the way to the arena that sat at a perceptible slant where the black pavement slumped toward the curb, but still the branches of the jacaranda tree, so big it had made the sidewalk around it buckle at a 90 degree angle, brushed the top of the truck, its purple flowers littering the shelf with the hot sauces and peppers. Or driving on the 110 toward downtown, where the hills of Highland Park and Happy Valley lift green and faraway out of the sun bleached concrete, topped with tall, sentry palms, the air murky with eucalyptus, exhaust, dry pine, sunset like a swim-up bar drink.

Out in the desert at Summer League, a few long blocks from the strip but far enough that you remember what you forget walking under the glass towers and 24hr sunlight of LEDs, that the only thing here before all this were calico rocks and red-yellow dirt, the dust of it, if there’s enough of a breeze rushing in from the desert around, catching against the sweat at your neck, a gritty little blessing. The air conditioning of Thomas and Mack set to “chest freezer”, goosebumps raising with the temperature as much as to the flinging limbs and splayed legs of chaotic basketball. How it felt to spill out into the night coming on, trying to adjust your breathing quick as you can from circulated air to air so dry it’s seizing, heat radiating up off the parking lot and sky all around hanging a gauzy, drifting purple, the last desperate light from the sun falling behind the distant La Madre mountains edging them in gold. Standing by yourself surrounded by so many people and rendered alone for a few dizzy seconds by the sprawl of the sky and air that wants to wring you all the way out.

The roughing, flaying cold wind off the lake in Chicago during All-Star. Trains clattering in a big, wide rectangle over downtown, river too bracing, too bright, to look at for very long, everyone snug under triple layers with just their eyes showing and still some kind of midwest warmth that fogs the heart. No sleep, no sense of time, all combining to alchemize that sweet sense of castaway delusion, an in-it-togetherness. Hotel basement ballrooms made compact with beige dividing walls on tracts, the smell of orange cheddar drifting in from the buffet table in the hall, low light, warm wine, warm beer, white teeth, shifting glances at credentials hanging around people’s necks out of habit, there’s no reading in rooms like that. The steel-bright mornings with the sun racing up over a half frozen Michigan and down the river, white clouds of steam from the top of every building freezing in place. Lost for hours, happy for days.

In Hong Kong, wandering the courts of the island, some on cut-out plateaus that end jutting into nothing but sticky air 150ft up and others wedged between powder pastel concrete apartment buildings reaching three times as high, but all in a constant tug-of-war with the jungle’s tendency to creep down the peak, in and over everything. In Mexico City, one I found between the on and off-ramps to the highway, painted in bright primaries with the rush of traffic and horns and the permeating thrum of the city for sound.

Even in Toronto, familiar, but the timing I’d nailed from my door to subway to Union Station to the maze of scaffolding inside the station’s ten year renovation, only one glancing section, some twenty or so steps, outdoors and with them the smell of the sewer, hot dogs, all edged by the sharp cold of winter, shifting through cluster galaxies of people, how my pulse jumped a little more with every step closer to the press entrance, some nondescript door without a handle that had to be opened from the inside, just to be able to go down, down, down into concrete tunnels of another kind. The shine of the court mirrorlike, how it brightened everybody’s face.

Or the dense heat of an August night on the Danforth, humidity coiling around the bodies standing under the lights of a temporary midway in Greektown, one hand doing pop-a-shot and the other holding a gyro, tzatziki running around your wrist like a watch.

Even when I was a little forlorn at ending the conversation, going on a half hour and with only so much you can say about tendons to someone not so versed in their function, how clingingly crucial, our farewell, another sunny “Ciao Katie!”, made the whole exchange feel cyclical. A small and less depressing echo of how time feels like it’s actually passing. I sat for a few minutes more in my kitchen, snow starting to fall outside, picturing the doctor leaving his office and going out into the narrow streets, the bricks at his feet arranged in fanning arches brightened by lamplight and what little came out of closed shops and restaurants. It was a reaching reprieve, I’ll be the first to admit it, but I thrummed a little inside for the first time in a while at where basketball could still take me, especially now when I feel a certain distance, like I’m holding this whole season at arm’s length, wary. If I’m being honest, one of the things keeping me close is picturing a future of shifting locations where the only familiar thing is the rhythm on court; days passing long, full and differentiative again of all the worlds outside an arena.