Basketball forever, but that's it
Fall is a season where, I’ve found, the other versions of yourself in all the other lives you started and sent out into the world, in some way, even if they ended up dead ends, done and over with, return to you. As if on the longest, tenuous tethers you could imagine, trotting back, variations of the person you could have been if you weren’t the one you are right now.
I check Facebook when I remember it, and I remembered it tonight, and saw the message icon dinged up with something waiting. In it, a group message with 23 people I used to go to raves with. The first thing was a funeral home obituary page that populated a photo of a guy we all knew, or still had known, in varying degrees of familiarity. The next thing was a person saying they weren’t sure if everyone had heard about the accident he was involved in. He died, shy of two weeks ago, in a motorcycle accident in Malaysia. I didn’t know him anymore. Don’t know any of the people in the same message, not presently. I barely knew them when I was 15, 16, dancing beside them in the dark for 12ish hours on end, going with them to afterparties to come down and crash on couches and wait for the subway to start so I could go home and sleep. They all had 4-9 years on me, and took me in with care and familiarity that I realize sounds like it could have left a lot of room for awful things to happen but, in a mix of trust, teenage invincibility, and, just decent people, never did. Someone shared a photo of everyone at a party, smiling, shouting, I was so unfamiliar in it that I searched for a good 40 seconds before I found myself. Ryan, that was his name, a row above me, expression—open mouth, top teeth flashing the disposable bulb back—identical to my own.
The grief of him being gone isn’t mine. But the knowledge of a life coming out of the past like that, so close to mine and captured exactly proximal, gone, how does it not set you back on your heels. Look at any photo like that and be able to pick out who is here and who isn’t any longer, what happens when the eventuality of your life, as you’ve steered it, judders off track from the vibrations of another you left. You see how no choice deviates you completely from the ones you didn’t make, how they all have exactly zero finality until they do.
Death, dying, scares the shit out of me but I’ve been around it. I don’t think it’s the kind of fear you can submerge in, like a tank full of tarantulas, to dull. What scares me about it is what you leave, how lonely, missing people and what you didn’t do or see or mess your way through yet. How you can never be together again, one more time, with the people who you feel in your body. It opens up this kind of hole in the pit of my stomach I feel myself inverting into, there’s a physical sensation, a falling forever. When I was little the first time I felt it, in what would become its prime time, falling asleep or alone in the middle of the night, I ran to my parents room, crying. I tried to vocalize it to my mom. The thing that ended up calming me down was going through all the people I knew and getting her to reassure me that they would die, too. A part of me still does this when the totality of the feeling hits, so big my brain only grapples with it for a few seconds. Like a breathing exercise. Like naming everything you know to be real. Like the shittiest fucking FOMO.
Fall is a life/death cycle. October especially. Colours start to speed, go crazy, blanch, all at once. Days can be slow with heat and nights tick down to single digits. Rain still floods green, kicks up petrichor, but comes with a clinging chill that winnows to bones with a wink versus the permanent, leeching vice grip that’s coming. October is also when my birthday is, so aside from the natural symbolism of one full set of seasons coming around the curve to finish, that’s another year, for me, down.
You’re like, how’s she going to tie this to basketball.
A huge spider, big as a lime, showed up in my kitchen window yesterday morning. Jeans was on top of the fridge moving her orange head back and forth like a king cobra and while it’s not weird behaviour for her, a demon, it was too early for birds, and raining, so I got closer to see if there was something she was staring at.
Dangling there, hidden by dark clouds hanging at the horizon, the sun still climbing on the other side of the house, was a spider bigger than I have ever seen in the city. I didn’t understand how it was suspended there, on threads I couldn’t see. I watched it as the sky lightened, finishing up its work, wrapping flies too small to offer it sustenance tidily up for later. By the time I got out of the shower it was gone.
Yesterday evening, the sky reversing what it had done that morning, I went to take a flash photo of it as it clocked back in for the night. I wanted to see the markings on its huge and disgusting abdomen to decipher what kind of orb weaver native to Ontario it was. I waited for the phone screen to focus, the flash went off in a burst. I looked first at the screen, saw it had taken in focus, and looked back up to the window. The spider was gone. I think I sent it clear off its gossamer anchor, tumbling to the garden below, when I blasted it with that kind of single burst light. Or else, and I’m hoping, it went loping up to a corner of the frame to hide from daylight coming on like annihilation.
What a dumb thing, to break something apart with force to maybe be able to look at it for five minutes after, also, I guess, to be so sad for such a big bug.
Basketball starts in October. We call it a season but it’s two years cracked in half, bridged, cobbled together at the end of one and the very beginning of another. Counting back years in basketball is tricky for this. One season, two years, accelerated, so long in the slump of March, and also, really, no time at all. When I try to remember what happened seasons ago they inevitably gather, lose all scope, become one mess of what came before this one.
The impermanence of basketball is what makes it easy to hang so much on. Why we all get so unbearable this time of year. Ready, nervous, already exhausted, knowing what happens now we’re not even going to remember by the Christmas games, knowing what happens now can still be erased by a team blown apart in February. Knowing preseason rankings are a symptom of NBA deprived lunacy. That more than any season in recent memory this one needs to get all the way going before the chemistry is clear, that we ought to enjoy the wide open landscape for what it is but also knowing, though it is worse, better of ourselves.
You can cycle through so much in a season that time goes slippery, quits meaning the same thing it does in the rest of your waking hours. Facts flips to false, the impossible comes surging up sure as blood, things that weren’t meant to be much are suddenly everything, a guy says something out of control—and that’s about one day. The rhythm of basketball takes over most nights. Your pulse, sometimes your circadian, sync to it. You can fall asleep so comfortable with a ball bouncing against an amplified court in the background, underscored by the accompaniment of shoes squeaking on hardwood, and wake up to the same sounds, in another game, having no grip of time and still relinquishing your instinct to panic at having lost it. Four quarters, twelve minutes, time sanctioned, you know what it means, where it ends up even if it shimmies and slows on the way there. If a ref makes a call to stall it, well, that’s something to rally against, an argument to make against time that you might stand to win.
Compared to life, where time is something you can check in on here and there if you’re lucky enough, where most decisions you make, actions taken as a result, are tethered to the trust of having time but informed by the distrust of where it goes, basketball is a freedom. It pump fakes at time as a gullible defender who falls for it. Replays, reviews, bringing the clock back. We exist, watching it, on the micro and macro level, aware of the minutes as they form the season, a season structured to hit certain markers exactly as anticipated except for at its end, where upheaval is the dream and game minutes can take ten real ones, of which we are happy to hand over for how they can draw out the mastery of something so impossible.
And when it’s over? We get a rest. We get to look backward without limit, no guilt of nostalgia, because the time in between then and the next season is exactly, always, the same. Everything that meant so much is over and starts again, a new slate, a lifetime, new guys coming in as others go out, but nothing disrupts. Basketball, in the way it curves time, sticks it to it, is weirdly forever. You run alongside something like that as long as you can, it doesn’t make you desperate, it makes you human.
Your life coming back to you in all its forms, the thing is you never see the versions out ahead, only what you put behind you. The fear of losing it never leaves, just swerves, goes off for a stretch and crashes around you in the dark. The only thing you have to give to your past when confronted by it is recognition of yourself in it. You are always going to have to yield.
Softness comes in sentimentality, in remembering your body caught almost in moments of suspension—touch, working muscle, going dizzy from holding out on breath—how physical force, through gentling, through extremes, will counter time, for a time, each time. Sometimes stalling is the refusal to make any decision at all, sure, but sometimes it’s the lag that comes in attempting to reconcile ghosts. The nights don’t quit which is good, bad, terrifying, lucky. You lose and you come back, lose and start over, that’s only breathing.