Sequentially, abstractly, continuously

The weight in thoughtfulness, the frenzied levity of fandom, the heft of memory.

December started with alarms.

Since moving into the building, and it’s an old building, we’ve had a handful of fire alarms. I’m not used to living somewhere that you can’t go take the batteries out, or knock the alarm with the handle of a broom to shut it off.

These alarms are dotted throughout the building’s hallways, plus one in our own. When we first moved in, when we had nothing unpacked, I wondered if books and furniture would muffle the sound later on. It’s later on and I can report: nope. For whatever reason, they’ve been going off more often lately. Each time between three to five fire trucks trundle up within five to seven minutes in front of the building, a few stories below our kitchen window. The firefighters pile out, check things over, shut the alarms off.

A memo went out after the last one. The fire inspector had deemed a few things in the building not up to code. One is that in the indoor parking, people need to remove the things that aren’t cars from their spaces. For the most part these are grocery carts and bikes. When we toured the building before we moved in we both liked that there were things besides cars in the garage. The garages are locked, but it suggested a sense of trust between the people that lived here. When we moved in we leaned our bikes against the wall in front of our parking spot.

It strikes me that this is how all unspoken things go. The rules get gently bent, become softly pliable between a group of people for a stretch of time, and it tends to last until someone says the unspoken thing out loud.

In life and not in garages, the unspoken thing is often what’s guarded. The careful thing, the don’t jinx it thing, the most secret of hopes thing — all in all though, the most personal thing. As much as we struggle with the unspoken things, there is a measure of care in them. For ourselves, it’s mostly in acknowledging what we’re not ready for yet. With other people, the measure of care comes as a weight. To remember, be considerate. To be thoughtful. To think of people.

In work, for me, that tends to be research. Preparing for interviews in the way I like to, which means going beyond game stats and highlights, and also going beyond the last handful of interviews that person may have given, takes time. I know when I’ve winged it because, ironically, the conversation feels heavier. Investing the time and intentionality tends to make things lighter, not like everything is so easy-breezy but like the time together, whether five or 45 minutes, flows. In life, well it’s tougher.

The best relationships feel timeless. That doesn’t mean you aren’t aware, sometimes painfully, of the time you’ve put into them. Only that there are people for whom time skips, sloughs away for, however long it’s been since you last saw them.

I think of all the measures of time that are tied up with Steph, my best friend since we were 15. How if I really get granular I can pick out days when we were 16, 18, 23, 28, 34, down to the weather, how cold we were walking around the ravines between our parents houses, the way she looked coming up from under water at Ward’s Beach, sitting on our old stoop in Montreal, or lying back beside me with the front seats reclined in my mom’s parked car at Darien Lake after seeing Third Eye Blind, pretending to drive. Beautiful days, bad days, awful days, regular days, all of them coming to focus and going together in a wash. And now, her son here and a week old, how he changes the weight of time but also so easily slips into it. Not as in a life before him and now a life with him here, at least not for me, but as something circular. There was us meeting on a bus going to music camp, hours later Steph catching me trying on her clothes, and now, in this same world, a new little line of time that folds into these other ones — sequentially, abstractly, continuously.

The timelessness comes from carrying, effectively, three histories with people. Yours, theirs, and yours and theirs together. One doesn’t stop when another comes to eclipse, it just becomes the primary focus. There can be discomfort in that, lord knows I’ve had those stretches with people and myself, whether out of ego or hurt or the ego of hurt, it happens. But to tend to the lives of the people you love while you’re away from them, to hold onto them in your mind when they flash across it, to let them know they’re there in the ways you’ve worked out between each other, I think it has to be one of the easiest ways to be thoughtful and luxuriate, a little, in them. In nostalgia, yes, and with its limits. But mainly in love.

In basketball, it’s strange — but isn’t — to see that fandom is also the exercise of actively carrying dual and twined histories, whether with a player, a team, sometimes just the abstract ideologies of a team. The line here for adopting an entire other entity as personality gets drawn a bit heavier. I picture it in a thick Sharpie that bleeds through whatever it touches.

The difference is that we don’t know these people, and that for these people, a part of their job is to maintain the illusion that a shared history is possible, or has already happened, or is always, even right now, happening. Fandom encourages you to dive in at any point, so the fluidity of time and the relationship’s status within it has to be constantly brand new green and hopeful while simultaneously established, well-worn if a bit dusty. It strains to mimic your closest and most well-cared for relationships, but en masse, and without the embarrassment of wearing your loved one’s name on a shirt.

For what is so puerile, or can be on occasion pretty dark about basketball fandom, its capacity for an exhaustive, accurate, emotionally complex collective memory is pretty beautiful. Everything lives in there. NBA shorthands in nicknames, locations, events, numbers (a box score sequence, dates, the back of a jersey). There have been times when, for a story or just for myself, I reach out with the most abstract message to friends in this world, about a game somebody had or trying to remember a guy, and based on the thinnest and insular of references they will respond within minutes and the feeling in my head is like a lightbulb exploding.

There’s also the ability to offload what feels in the moment like a defeat and disappointment so big it will crush you to thousands of other people so you can get out from under it and take a deep breath. And when it goes the other way? When joy is ratcheted up to the point of delirium because you’re experiencing it alongside the same several thousands, or tens of thousands, in tandem — you don’t forget what that’s like. It lives in your body and you chase it like a lunatic, feel the tremors and far-away echoes of it when things get fast and good, when you wrap the tremulous thing called hope around your hand so hard it cuts off circulation, like a giant helium balloon ripping around in a storm.

The thing about memory and the weight of it is it doesn’t go away when someone is gone. It’s such a dumb, incredibly superficial thing but when I think of the Raptors Championship run and Nick my timelines get muddied. I always think of him going through it. Maybe because I can see it, in the treachery of my composite memories of him and knowing how caught up in it he would’ve gotten.

I used to think I thought of Nick most in summer. The season when we always seemed to run into each other coming home from our separate nights, the both of us biking up or down Delaware opposite each other, grinning and stopping to share stories about who’d gotten up to what while the sky lightened up, went from night to morning around us and we sheepishly said goodnight (“Good morning?”) and went the last few blocks to our own places as the outlines of rooftops came into focus. Nick with his long arms and legs, bare in the heat, golden brown hair set off in the sun. Pool hopping, popsicles, street fairs, always sort of wet. A natural in that season, like Rach.

Maybe a month ago, in the last blazing days of fall, sitting on the patio of a coffee shop in the west end I hadn’t been to since I lived three blocks away to Nick’s two, almost 10 years ago, and a tall and slim and still broad shouldered guy breezes past and in the patio door. He was wearing a well worn plaid shirt, the kind that was always passing around hands at Delaware to each sibling’s frustration. Then, I thought, maybe I think about him most in the fall. His hazel green eyes set off in that light. How we’d talk about the season starting, how he never criticized anybody on the team, just wanted to talk through the roster. This guy was Nick’s height, almost exactly. My heart skipped, memories getting muddled when it came to present and past tense, what’s possible, what’s not. He’s so quick in the shop, this guy, getting his order, that when he came out the door facing me, and even if I already knew what I’d see — no goofy grin, dimpled chin, cheekbones up around his temples — I feel angry at him, this stranger. Why he had to get in and out so fast. Why he couldn’t give me a few extra seconds to linger.

During the holidays when everyone came home to the city to be together again, and always seemed to start and end our nights at Delaware Ave. Four stories of warm, well-worn hardwood creaking under the weight of three generations. Nick trailing us happily to house parties or tiny bars with the windows fogged and indoor Christmas lights blurring and running down in bright drips in the condensation, every year the age gap between us shrinking. The cold squeak of boots on snow in January, February, bumping into each other on the streetcar, around the neighbourhood, even when everyone was in hibernation. Then spring with its promise, everything coming back to life, playing pickup in the schoolyard by Bellwoods, Nick as a new uncle. Nick’s service, also in the spring.

It was Nick’s, would’ve been Nick’s, 33rd birthday this weekend, and it made me realize there isn’t a season where I didn’t, don’t, think of him. A continual loop of hearing his laugh and laughing along with it. Past and present in tandem and these lurching moments where I catch myself between. The weight of memory is harder to hold, but there’s something important in that. The heft and reality of a world where all the timelines keep going. The rules bend gently, no alarms.