Feathered and scuffed lines
The strip of sky above was a blue but south, over the lake, tall clouds shone a gradient between pewter and deep, dark steel. The 6pm sun was big and bright, shooting from the west through trees and the chainlink that separates the edge of the park from the back soccer field of the Catholic school, empty, with its fresh white lines in the synthetic turf. Apocalypse light.
There was a flash of quick white in the corner of my eye and a shrill whistle. I turned in time to see the body of a sleek, marble white whippet come tearing around the base of a wide oak, jump, curl its body like a fortune cookie mid air, angling up after the black squirrel it’d just missed. The whistle again.
Twenty yards away two more whippets, white like the first, one with a big brindle blotch on its flank, were weaving infinity symbol loops around a woman coming slowly toward us.
In the last five weeks there’ve been all kinds of unfamiliar people and their dogs surfacing in the habitual places of our routine. Generally, everyone is probably out more. Extra walks in the middle of the day mean more chances to cross the paths of people who kept schedules slightly off our own, and it has made a stir in days that otherwise have started to undulate like waves coming in, over and over, rhythm and speed unchanged.
This woman and her three white whippets and the eerie light, would it have been as arresting to me if so much of the world didn’t feel still, silent? I took my two oafs over the middle path that cuts down the park, out of big, still oaks, segueing over that section of it to her and her etherial dogs, but stopped every dozen feet to turn back and find them again, cutting bolting patterns in the chimeric light.
Some sure things: How quick to verge of tears I’ve been all week, for no real reason. The knotted clump that’s taken up root at my solar plexus, making it so I have to concentrate occasionally on taking a deep, full breath from way down. How I shift in and out of lasered interest of the big things I am working on, have to rewind ten second snatches of recorded interviews to transcribe them, over and over, losing the words so easily as soon as they’ve replayed back to me. Have, at times, no recollection of parts of the conversation to the point where they come as startling surprises, what’s being said to me. Me, who asked the question and who already heard the answer.
And dreams. Really strange dreams — you too, right? One, I was waiting in a gigantic lineup, almost at the front, everyone around excited. Someone I don’t know but knew in the dream, one of those composite people your brain makes for you, shouted goodbye as they were leaving this big, half mall-half futuristic office space. I waved. They pointed at someone standing just beside them, a few people up from me. Greg Monroe, they mouthed. I gasped so hard in the dream I probably also did it in my sleep. Then, I was hanging out with Greg Monroe inside this place, what turned out to be a library. They were never closing, someone else said. We were so happy. I think “1999” was playing and if it wasn’t, it was the feeling that you get when you listen to that song.
I was juggling two leashes in one hand, poop bag in the other, phone wedged between my cheek and my shoulder, when the big guy on the bike swerved too close to the curb and Captain let out two big barks, straining in a short jump forward on the patch of grass at the hydro pole that lifted his two front feet off the ground. The guy went around the corner slurring, swearing. Captain was quiet again but the guy hadn’t quit, Steph, in my ear, was asking me what was going on. Chill out, I half called over my shoulder at the guy, who slammed his two feet down on either side of the bike, stopping in the middle of the empty street. Your fucking dog tried to attack me, was how he started another long string of vitriol. He said something about the dog being out of control.
Aside from now being a day clear of it, and that he was startled, there is something like a thin line I’ve noticed that’s risen up to the surface in the past week, something you can almost feel throbbing there like a fresh, quick scratch, or the invert in your skin when you set down something heavy you’ve been lugging, the ghost of strain there before the blood rushes to fill it. A little bit of an edge in the air. A jagged finish some social interactions feel they’re gonna catch on. New routines in this have become familiar but there is no close horizon at hand. Nothing to look to that feels measurable. We’re all still carrying this heavy thing around, no sense of when we’ll be able to collectively set it down and feel the blood come back.
Anyway, he told me to go fuck myself and I wish I could tell you it didn’t rattle me right through for the rest of the day. My head vibrating down through my body like a cartoon character that gets a baseball bat brought down on them.
Some sure things: How fussing around and rearranging books on the shelves, thinning ones I felt too guilty to not pack the last time I moved, will calm me down. How finding postcards, letters, lists tucked into them will remind me the world isn’t shrinking.
I started doing watercolours. Something about how you can scribble an outline with a pencil, or set down a dense blob of colour, bring a new brush with a bead of water down on it and watch the line feather, the blob burst open. There are no hard edges and the process is forgiving at every stage. You can add as you go, darken, deepen, wash out, leave it to dry, forget about it, come back and see how complete something half finished turned out.
I keep thinking about the high shine of a court when I do it. How overhead stadium light on hardwood will bleed the court lines out, erase them. Hear the shrieks of sneakers pivoting on a line, a little too late, a body gone hurtling out of bounds into the tense laps of people in the first row. How many moments of easy erasure can happen in a game. How many games seem forgone conclusions, hopeless, run away with, dominated, until the lines blur. A shot comes from deep down at half court, the ball lurches for a second on what feels like the collective intake of breath, sinks and the distance between two numbers suddenly cinches. A player gets a hot hand, a player loses their focus, a player suddenly gets it in their head that they aren’t going to ease off this one.
An ugly game takes a beautiful turn. Suddenly every shot is falling but more than that, with flourish. Guys are sinking them and spinning to shimmy backward, toss a little hand move, jaw something to a teammate or the opposing guy coming at them with a tiny spark of fear in his eye at sensing the shift in the air. A team comes back from ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty. They do it by drawing it out torturously or so fast it doesn’t seem possible for made vs. attempts. Or else the opposite. The wheels tear off. The thing breaks down. It goes arduous where it was easy, thoughtless, habit.
Surprises, it feels so childish to say you miss them, especially in circumstances where it seems there’s still more unknowns than things established. But basketball is so much the blurring of expectation over result. A mess within controlled boundaries. Feathered and scuffed lines with bodies slung over them. Blobs of colour, conductivity, exploding.
Some sure things: The dogs will find the sun. Watch as it slides down the white wall to the worn in hardwood floor where they are waiting, heads between their paws, eyes closing when the wide, warm slash of it comes to rest across their heads. Follow it through the morning, shifting their bodies in increments as it tacks across the room. Time softening, they rove with the light.