Gloaming fatigue, a gilded collapse
A deep and heavy kind of exhaustion that has you zoning out standing still, letting your eyes swim out of focus in the deep hued and heavy gold light of a November Sunday luminous and vibrating in the double digits. The air gone hazy, warmly opaque, last of the leaves dangling lazily on the trees. Huge, beaming yellow maples, crispy orange oaks, ochre beeches and burnt toffee birch.
There’s a rag tag group of people who play volleyball in the big park at the end of the street all summer, trash league we fondly call them, and they’re back out with their contingent of fans hunkered deep in folding chairs cracking and slowly drinking Labatt Blue bottles. A kid is tearing through leaf piles on their tiny bike, getting off and methodically piling high everything just blasted apart back together. People are staring at the way the light plays through every branch, closing their eyes and tilting their faces to the sinking sun. Everyone is smiling.
Back to back coffees on an open air patio with a pandemic baby shower to our backs, I haven’t seen Ashley laugh in months but when she first does it’s like a song that’s been stuck in your head forever finally syncing up with the real thing, playing out. You relax, feel something slip away, your brain quit turning tight circles and go skipping away. The last time we did this was in another city in another country, the cold a thing with sharp teeth, a long time and nothing at all ago.
Letting my arms hang from the armpit over the sides of the bathtub, waiting for the medical shampoo to work on George’s allergy prone paws. He stands, occasionally turning to gently and deeply sniff my head. The velvet black of his ears deep, nearly blue, soaking in the light as I turn on the spray, test it to warm, wash the suds from between every toe, the pink of his paw pads bright. All it takes is a tiny shift of my body out of his way, a tilt of my shoulder and a quiet “ok” and he’s springing over the side, shaking dry, his long tail thwacking the wall.
It’s the exhaustion of relief. I don’t feel it the same as my American friends but through their eyes and partially coherent texts I can glean. Relief of a long week, long years, and relief too at what they didn’t even know was there, a tension and apprehension to be hopeful, a whole lot of self-protection around what’s the point of wishing for better when it always seemed to turn out worse. The freedom to have expectations again, normal or outsized. That kind of turning in, again and again, will make your world so small over so long that when you look and see how little room you have left, to wish or want for better, there isn’t enough room to let your thoughts drift from the immediate, crushing present.
Looking ahead now is a little like watching a rock skip over water on a clean, good throw. Time bouncing out and out and out, the farther it gets the lighter the weight. There’s so much planning to come, so many starts. Winter in earnest, a new administration, new daily infection records, a draft, an NBA season. How moving toward any one thing is moving toward all of them at once.
In Toronto, I’ve no clue whether we’ll be back in arena tunnels, spaced but once again alongside the rhythms of a game day. When I think about it my brain coils around the hows and whens and mostly how unlikely it all feels. I hang and I drift.
The quality of light isn’t exactly the same but the down draft of arena lighting, often through the vaporous haze of smoke from spent fireworks, creates the same kind of suspension sun clinging to unseasonally warm motes of air do. In it, bodies flung and arching, blood flared up in the ears, nothing but fingers straining toward a rim because of how languid, everyday, lackadaisical it all looks even when the person who is airborne is also screaming.
I miss forgetting I’m holding my breath, choking on it as a result.
LeBron on the nights he’s got no one in front of him, a clear and waltzing path to the rim, a sunny valley. How he’ll shorten one step so he can take two long ones before he lifts, swinging the ball with both hands slowly from knee to knee to a diagonal that glances his heart, this gravity reversing sign of the cross.
How in all that dense honey gold light dripping down with heat from above Ja Morant’s body can’t be slowed, even on replay. Zion, swinging from the rim like a church bell, twenty thousand voices tolling in unison. Kawhi going up for it and when his fingers touch rim on the way down, ball delivered, his brain suddenly remembers what he’s done and he hangs there one-handed, surveying the court, the crowd, spinning the slowing seconds around himself.
When DeMar DeRozan brought an entire world of meaning down on Chris Boucher’s head via a basketball. From the ground, flat on his back and still sliding, Boucher mouthing what looks like, “Wow.”
Jarrett Allen jumping from the free throw line, not even out just up, and reaching forward, over Mike Muscala’s head, his whole life, one arm out at a 90 degree angle like a suspension bridge over a canyon, a gulf, an ocean. Bam Adebayo lifting to catch a wayward pass, dunking one handed but coming down to earth on pointed toes and the other leg way out in a high kick, body bent backward from the waist and arms frozen at opposite sides like he’s mid-sprint with such an all-teeth flashing at once grimace it looks as if he’s broken his back but really, once velocity has caught up, he’s grinning.
These hammering moments slowed down to devastate time, your expectations, bodily physics. You sink once more exhausted to earth, the weight of relief heavy at every limb. If I can’t have them up close yet then I can reel back and sit in memory like a trance, bone tired but lifted. In basketball, the state of the world, seasons folding into another, exhaustion as a bridge between here and what’s next. Gloaming fatigue, a gilded collapse.