Cutting flying moving
Last trade deadline I got off a plane to the news that JV and Delon Wright had been traded away in exchange for Marc Gasol, and most cruelly, that Greg Monroe had simply been waived for cash. Walking around under the heat of Mexico City with my best friend I felt a little cut loose. I let momentum take over.
Drifting through Roma, under the shaded canopy of the Condesa, passing through one bright mercado after another, fingers trailing over pottery and textiles so bright my February in Toronto brain struggled to find a reference point for that kind of colour. Sweating under the wide open sun of the Zócalo, gawking up at the Metropolitan Cathedral, spray off the fountains found in just about every city square landing on my bare forearms and drying in the afternoon air. We laughed a lot. My muscles felt rangy and long and generous, a kind of steady state I fall into with travel, and probably why I love it so much.
Being with someone, too, who forced me to the front of things, whatever moment we were in. At night, in our hotel beds with noise from the streets of Juárez drifting up through the windows, I would steal a few minutes to scroll, catch up on players and where they went. Invisible lines across a continent and what it meant to them, to anyone tracing a mental finger alongside their movements. Drifting off to Made In Mexico on Netflix and people laughing outside, the short bursts of cabs honking, the day’s heat lifting.
It felt like the NBA, trades, all of it, was held in suspension and waiting for me across a border some 2,000km north. In the days we just walked and moved and talked, blitzed our eyes with colour, took comfort in being in a city so big it swallows you up.
This trade deadline I was in the media room at the Raptors practice facility, waiting for the deadline and for Bobby Webster, watching my fingers jump from key to key in one of those dissociative writing moments where the thoughts are perfectly aligned with the speed of getting them out, if not a little ahead. It was snowing outside and on the walk over, cutting behind the ornate, glass-domed buildings of Medieval Times, tracing a path parallel with the dozing, half-frozen lake, flakes kept hitting my teeth for how many smiles were slipping out, in spite of myself.
Nick Nurse, after Wednesday’s Raptors-Pacers game, became momentarily dissociative when describing the energy of it on either side of the court. “Cutting flying moving”, he said, and I jotted it down without punctuation because he didn’t leave room for any.
It’s the same kind of feeling I’ve had from last February to this one.
Things are flying, rushing, slipping sideways and rolling joyfully over, regaining feet and without missing a step, back on the run again. The pace of the Raptors hasn’t slowed since those trades last deadline, swelling with the title, letting the rush of that moment roll back only a little before the speed, and the way forward, started to rise again. Even the physical hobbling of injuries, one after another, hasn’t been enough to throw this team off its intended trail. If you know them, then you know that means another run at the Championship, if you don’t, then you might perceive their going full-tilt as fun, maybe joyful, even admirable. If you know them, then you know two out of those three reasons are true, but that Toronto never took their eyes from that target, even in all the years before they hit it head on.
For me, I haven’t held the year that’s passed toward the same linear, singular goal, because I still can’t say what that looks like for me. But as the speed of this year has forced things to fall away from me, almost like all the stuff strapped to a rocket that inevitably is doomed to become space junk, I’ve found a clearer picture. The thing about steady work, when you’re in it, is that you don’t get the clear scope of it like a bystander does. Watching a basketball team move through a season, knocking down pre-scheduled games, there is a neatness to that kind of trajectory that appears assured, maybe even destined depending on where in the calendar you catch them. The arc of a season, even with upsets, has a known end and goal. Life, obviously, doesn’t work that way. We picture what we want as a composite, made up of what we’ve already had, what we project as far as we can imagine—imagination even framed by parameters of what we’ve known for real—and using what we don’t want as psychic border or motivator. When things start really rolling there can be a tendency to put your arms out for balance, to slow down, but what I’ve found in this year as much as a better direction is starting to trust momentum as a generator. My own little revving backup source of power, the grounder of which is shoved way down deep in the core of where I’ve been.
Yeah, you do gotta be careful with speed. To weigh whether it’s the rush of just moving, air on your face, that seems like progress, or if you’ve made some. But it’s only you that gets to do the weighing. One step forward or getting to where the days blur behind you, knowing the difference between moving and being moved. You can lie to yourself at any speed but it’s at least a little harder when you’re doing the driving.
“I’m being the lighthouse.” Rina said at the Ritz counter over our wrong orders.
She meant about the energy you zing out into the world and what you are asking to come back to you with it. Cracking the lids on our to-go cups, we obviously hadn’t projected with too much intention there, but sometimes the starkness of black coffee is a good starting point.
Dewan Hernandez had snuck up behind me in the Raptors locker room, empty other than media and Terence Davis. It was an hour before the Super Bowl and guys had cleared right out. Halfway through Davis’s postgame, after he had talked about how much the team loved and cared for each other, how he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, there was a sniffling sound, and then a short sob like an Old Hollywood starlet might have made, coming from right above my head. I looked up and a little bit back and Hernandez was grinning.
He let Davis go on, but clearly not done with celebrating the first year player’s big night—30 points in a win against the Bulls—waited for a lull in questions to begin reading Davis’s stats from the boxscore printout, paused for effect, then asked, “Is this because we had a great dinner last night?”
“We did have a good dinner,” Terence Davis agreed, giving the question the same kind of weight as all the others, “but the guys kept finding me.”
The whole, short interview had sharp glimmers that lodged in my chest—Davis calling Serge Ibaka “a light in my life”, for one—but there was something about the back and forth between those two, and the earnest way Davis ended it, that has stayed with me all week.
If you talk about energy, what you’re putting out, what you want back, learning to shed what doesn’t serve you or listen to what will, eventually, even if it’s hard, then what Davis meant seemed so much the same to me. You have all your high points, your speed, the growth along with it, but what you want is for all those things to keep finding you, again and again. For you to be open more than looking.
I keep having these startling flashes where I’m going through the motions of any given day—reading on the train, running the dogs in a field full of new snow—and this overwhelming, scrambling-to-run up-my-whole-body-like-a-little-thing-with-claws gratitude hits me and I burst into tears. I think I’m maybe being the lighthouse, but in strobe. If like attracts like then what does deranged joy drag back to you?