Exits: Rare blue, blue, blue

The Magic's quandary: to win again without losing the anatomic hitch of loss. Life's quandary: the same.

The last time I was in Orlando, Jason and I drove up from Tampa. He was insistent: he wanted me to go to Disney World at night. I was skeptical, liked much better the road trip we’d made south, hugging the Gulf. Its winter-bundled retirees set out on their faded woven folding chairs, watching as I made whooping for the water. Its panther X-ing road signs, its cotton candy sunsets that tinted the beach the same hue, strewn as they were with red tide.

Jason knew this about me. Like he knew I wouldn’t mind spending idle days alone by his apartment’s pool, the only person there who found Florida’s December temperatures balmy, delighting at the strings of Christmas lights wound around the palm trees wide trunks and up through their spindly fronds. He held onto more than I did, I remember thinking. Much of it tied to the first clumsy sketches of who we’d turn into as adults when we drafted our outlines as teenagers. He had a way of honouring those outlines even if they were, then in our late-20s, what we were so eager to outgrow.

So I trusted him about Disney.

And he of course was right. I was charmed by the tram driver who picked us up in the colossal parking lot, drawling kindly to remember we’d parked in Captain Hook. The bizarre order of words soundtracked by the tram’s buzzy speakers, determined to set Disney songs into our brains like hookworms. On arrival, we wandered over the wooden walkways of the Polynesian Village, recorded hoots of monkeys and sudden drums startling us into laughter. We lingered at the murky waters of the Seven Seas Lagoon as fireworks seemed to intermittently lift in the distance, ubiquitous, every five minutes, leaving their bright smear over the pitch dark surface.

The last time I was in Orlando, strange to think about now.

Even in the silence, what stretched between us was comfort. On the drive back to Tampa, my head resting against the door’s wide shoulder with the window rolled to Central Florida’s drone of cicadas and rap radio; sitting on a swell of beach dune in Naples with a six pack between us and watching the sun sink sticky peach into the Gulf. Eyeing the dining room of a highway Cracker Barrel outside of Fort Myers and knowing we both felt, right then, how far from home in distance and culture. Or nervous, as our Everglades fan boat driver inched us closer to mangroves draped with sleeping baby raccoons in case one of them startled and slipped into the water, rippled with the ridged backs of gators.

If we really looked at each other we could’ve picked out the stubborn cling of our awkward teenage tells — how he’d cast his eyes suddenly wide in a moment that might press too much, how I’d press too much — but I’ve never felt less like I had something to prove with a person, even that neck-and-neck bravado of new friends, than I did with Jason. A magic I can’t say I understood the rarity of.

It’s a sudden wall of nothing, a void, a blankness, when I trip now into realizing he’s gone. Not like these moments didn’t happen, but like they’ve been lifted from this life and placed alongside, in the memory field of another. Maybe because I didn’t know he was sick, and then didn’t know how sick he’d gotten, so fast. Didn’t know he shed that funny section of Florida he made a life in to return home, to a small southern Ontario city he hated. Something about that relinquishing kills me, and makes me understand better that the workaday warmth of Tampa, the complete ordinariness of it even on the scale of Florida, was what he wanted most. Was happiest with. That he flew all over the world for his job and returned there, that flat sunny tract.

The trip he’d made for us, even though I’d made it on a whim to get out of winter Toronto and a life I was reckless to change without knowing how yet, was an homage to the frankness of care. Yes, you can stay at my small apartment. No, it won’t be trouble to take the workweek suddenly down the Gulf coast. Here’s a set of keys. Here’s the places I think we should stop in. I made reservations before you booked the flight. We have to go to Disney at night, I think you’ll like it.

He was a person I valued, a friend I valued, and I’d be lying if I said the valuation wasn’t rooted in the expectation that we would know each other all our lives, and the expectation that those would be long. Have the luxury of slipping in and out, catch up backdropped by the places we were living, uncovering their quirks and tender oddities through the perennially fresh lens of our formative years — this is like, remember when.

Expectations I know now are rooted in the act of taking for granted. Of not realizing the magic of a person’s continuity, their consistency, isn’t the reality of them carrying on somewhere out in the world (though it can sometimes be enough), but their insistence on the reality that your lives drew close, ran parallel, stayed intact even apart. That they pulled and keep pulling to an interior part of you. Kept pulling.

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There’s no NBA award for getting through a season seemingly fated to maim and harm you. There’s no NBA award for getting through a season in a perfectly normal, functionally serviceable way either. The Orlando Magic, at their season end, would’ve gladly taken the latter, recognition be damned. It was the former that dogged them like a starstruck haint since late-October. October 30th — Devil’s Night — specifically. A little too specifically for Paolo Banchero, who went down with a torn right oblique. Less than a month later Franz Wagner would be ruled out with the same.

Banchero and Wagner both came back in January, not such a bad stretch for recovery but a stretch where the Magic also lost the elder Wagner, Moritz, to a season-ending ACL tear, and Jalen Suggs to a riddled left knee. Suggs fell to the court screaming in Toronto, writhing with back spasms that led to the discovery of loose cartilage in his knee and another season-ending surgery for Orlando.

The team, people joked, felt cursed. Orlando had one of the hottest starts to the season, easily staking claim to the East, and then weathered not just one setback to one star, but several weirdly specific blows to nearly the entirety of their starting roster. In an 82-game season that took its bodily toll across the league and continues to now into the playoffs, I can’t speak on curses over unsustainable load, but I will say — the Magic did look haunted.

Faraway eyes and a strained bearing like they didn’t want to keep being watchful, but were worried for what might happen when they stopped expecting the worst. Coach Jamahl Mosley called it a kind of compartmentalization, what they were doing. In order to keep competing less all these people integral to their success, yes, but also to the fulsome sense of who they were as a team, they had to tuck them all away somewhere. Fold the negative space of their absences so it took up less space. How they were doing it, continued to do it, he never said. Nobody ever asked him.

How are you haunted? It requires something like a psychological trust fall, to entertain a question like that.

There’s a colour painted on houses in the American South’s Lowcountry, a pale, soft marine blue. It’s less corporeal than what you’d describe as robin’s egg and more pragmatic than seafoam suggests. You see it on the yawning ceilings of covered porches, on doors and window shutters. Haint blue. It was given the name by the Gullah, a distinct and storied community of Black Americans living in the Lowcountry with roots across West Africa. Derived from a light wash of indigo, a plant grown on many of the plantations where the Gullah were sold and forced into slavery, the colour was meant to deter restless and evil spirits from entering homes. It either mimicked water, which haints are thought unable to cross, or sky, urging lost souls to pass through, on from this world.

Haint blue is not the Magic’s blue, which falls somewhere between royal and cerulean, a bold blue. Watching Mosley walk slow out to Suggs as he tried hard to fold into himself on the floor, out to the Wagners and Banchero before him, I wondered whether colours could be used in douses, for steeling purposes. Like smelling salts. Haint blue, daubed on a custom swatch and kept in the pocket to ward off any more bad luck.

Ostensibly the Magic just come back next season, intact. They start the season the exact same way they did this one, less Suggs’ loose piece of knee cartilage. Some people might tell you Franz Wagner’s also lost his shot, elongated it with a hampering half-second hitch of delay. I say there’s some baggage that has to be expected when you spent seven months folding your concerns smaller and smaller, tucking them into pockets and wallet-folds, out of sight.

How are you haunted?

The goal of a season, any competitive team will tell you, is to win. At this point it’s rhetoric that invites the least pushback, but is, for a team like Orlando and where they are in their lifecycle, the point. The goal of a season, any bad or middling team will tell you, is to compete. In both cases competition is the driver, the humming thread. Pummelling tide and dragging undertow. When a team is going full-tilt, top of their game, there’s no need to examine competition for competition’s sake — the assumption is it will be there, already is. With the struggling team competition suddenly grows elusive. A theory, concept, and catchall with far too many components.

You never think of the phrase “the unexamined life isn’t worth living" until you are knocked from your axis, forced to slow and made to examine. The moral quandary: how to examine while living. Better still: how to hold onto life’s forced examinations, honour wisdom and memories even if you never wanted them in the past tense, while living with loss.

The Magic’s quandary: how to forget competition, turn it subconscious. Switch between what it’s like to be aware of your breath without being aware that you’re breathing. To win without losing loss’s perspective, its press for survival. That anatomic hitch.

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These magic things. To peel an orange in one long, continuous ribbon, to have perfect pitch alongside a favourite song. To wake in the night not out of fear, worry, or preoccupation, and hear the slow and rhythmic breathing of the people and creatures you love and live with, in their respective slumbers around you.

To hear a significant to you song playing out in the world, in what will become a resonate moment. Recent examples include ‘It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over’, a song that makes me think of Yusef and laugh, from a convertible crossing a canal bridge in Amsterdam, and ‘Everyone Falls In Love’ by Tanto Metro & Devonte, also from a car cruising slow, this time along St. Clair West as Dylan and I walked splitting sips of a strawberry milkshake.

The first glance of an ocean, unchecked hours and a summer afternoon to read sprawled in the cool palm of a quiet house; the last wipe of the tattooer when they’ve finished and reveal to you what’s there, skin radiant with vaseline and adrenalin’s flush. Night swims, overnight flights where you wake or open the window to a day that started without you in it, mornings alone. Picking up where you left off with someone, hours, days, years later.

Scent’s skeleton key on the long-locked doors of memory.

A baby’s deranged laugh, even better at you. A dog’s groan of pleasure as it stretches and gains a surprise octave. When the first sun-bright soprano strings break over the long note of tonal keyboard in Max Richter’s ‘Spring I’. Before you’ve said a word, have only taken a tighter than usual intake of breath, enough for your mom (or anyone made family) to say first What’s wrong? at the other end of the call.

First bites, first sips, first shared jokes. Hawks lifting from city rooftops, city scrub, startling in their size and silence. Bursting to tears in front of a painting you didn’t even realize was particularly affecting. Making the light, catching the train, stepping inside just as it begins to downpour (or, stepping out). Snagging a stranger’s eye, the both of you breaking your internal monologue to blurt a shy smile. Falling asleep on friends couches, in friends cars, waking to the feeling of being considered, cared for, a blanket laid over you or the radio turned down. Love’s easy adjustments.

The first time you meet someone you know is going to stick. The names might change, they might go from Jay to Jason as years go by and then to an understanding that you’re allowed the shorthand, familiarity’s deference, but you’ll always be able to call up the voice (mid-throes of puberty, deep but still with charming cracks), the expression (a droopy-lidded smirk, not at you, but at the world’s emerging realities), the mannerism (arm’s length, considering, but with a hand held open halfway), and the backdrop (blue: depths of lake blue, shards of sky blue glanced up between trees, quixotic pool blue; rare blue, blue, blue) of those early years in every iteration after. Hold it like an overlay against all the versions to come. Brutally less than you’d hoped for, more than you thought possible.