With the 11th & 12th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... YEARNING & PATIENCE

I miss very much the anonymity of being alone in the world, as myself. Trips that would take me away from home for the day, ping-ponging from place to place, or else long stretches in one spot, part of the ritual the getting there and, eventually, coming home. Away and happily listing between the concentration that comes in being alone either where you’re expected or you’ve placed yourself, and the sudden, welcome disruptions to being alone, from people, detours, expected or not. So much of life in a pandemic is a necessary routine around limiting daily anomalies — encounters, interactions, unnecessary trips — that serendipity is all but shot.

For me, for now, I know it’s the absence of two kinds of aloneness I’m missing and feeling the lack of as an inverse, detrimental weight. Both also require people. A lot of people.

Solitude is at the other end of the spectrum from isolation. The bare requirements are the same — yourself, alone — and both are imposed, but one is a choice and the other isn’t. Solitude is actively seeking out space to be by yourself, going to a physical place or, if you’re good at it, getting there in your head. Isolation is a mandate. Early on in the pandemic trips were, if you were lucky, scarce. Grocery store, pharmacy, maybe once a week. Even with two dogs our daily walks didn’t ramble, there was a circuit. You went out with the goal to get home. Now, as things are opening up, the destination still doesn’t feel like it’s shifted. You can go to more places but why, if you even should, would you?

In Toronto, parks are bursting and I’m pretty confident, for the uptick of groups laying out picnics and towels to tan on in the off-leash unfenced dog park at the end of my street who get mad when dogs come over to nose their bags and bodies, that people are striking out like pioneers of leisure to find space either new or strange to them. But you can’t use any bathrooms, go indoors, so isn’t every trip out, laden with coolers or not, already a kind of counting down to when you’re so uncomfortable you should be home already?

And we’re watchful. The pandemic has made us so aware of people who aren’t us, doing pretty much anything. I catch myself bunching up my eyebrows at entire families on scooters ripping down the sidewalk, the guy in the park blaring on a trumpet, a couple making out where I know approximately one hundred dogs have peed, and I force myself to unclench my face. People have to go outside. People have also created their own variations on what were, depending on where you live, loose rules or suggestions for all this to begin with.

The culmination is that there’s no such thing as being anonymous in the world right now. You can’t be unplanned, everything is intentional. Walking through the world unencumbered, virtually ignored, is its own kind of privilege but even in understanding that, everyone has been refreshed by how it’s felt. You loosen. You are suddenly aware of a blankness, an easing of weight. You’ve disappeared. For me, the main barrier to this has been the familiar (as in how often) gaze of men but when it blinks away, the ability to drink in long stretches where people might see me, but no one is really watching. The aloneness of solitude in your own body, without having to remove it from place.

There is a restorative power in shedding yourself like this. Part of it is complete unaccountability, for a bit, but it can be as simple as the pleasure of letting your eyes unfix, your breath find you. You hear but aren’t tuned. You roam in place.

The other is missing stadiums. Yearning for arenas in their accelerated life cycle of a game day. The routine of getting there, door to train to train to pedestrian crosscuts to side entrances and trying not to rush down concrete stairs to subterranean tunnels that smell like equipment permanently damp with sweat, and chlorine. An anticipatory hum you can’t place. Sloughing off layers in the media room. Easing or rushing to pregame pressers depending how much I joked with security on the way in or how many warm and wide open faces looked up from laptops, phones, video equipment, plus who was in the hallway on the way there. The eye-adjusting darkness of the chute out to court, unconscious blinking stepping out under arena lights, their baptismal, buzzing fluorescent wash, no two times ducking out under them ever feeling the same.

It doesn’t even matter what happens out there. Something always does. There is a rarity and luck in that that should’ve tapped out, that infringes on the rules of providence, probably.

I miss the community that comes in keeping odd and long hours around something so specific, exacting, the living pulse of the place, all those bodies breathing, screaming, jamming up beside me to jockey for a better spot for their phone to record. The waiting. I miss the waiting. The patience it takes to wait for a player who is waiting for the bus to the hotel to want to talk about what they’ve already left, are trying to leave. The patience of breath, of timing, to cut the skipping half-beat of silence in your favour and get someone to turn their head in a scrum, look up from a podium. The dedication on display from everybody in that space, the patience that takes, player or writer or team communications person juggling three clipboards and still warm from the printer stat and quote sheets in their hands or the guys who pack up all the team duffle bags, hoist them onto a dolly that won’t budge, and get everything to the other end of the arena, where the busses are yawning their doors open.

I never slowed down on how much I was writing when the middle of March bore down on everybody like a bad dream. When games stopped. If anything I accelerated. But the natural momentum is gone. To a degree, I can push, guilt myself into doing what I have to, wring what I need out of myself, but the thrumming, occasionally delirious, tender and exhilarating pace of what I was building for myself between concrete tunnels has quit. The way that it would feed the work and what I was doing as much as keep it anchored, give it a body, the kick of the schedule like a pulse, surprises like blooms of blood. A huge part, maybe the whole part, was people. In a poured concrete building that does not change, the people in it are the anomalies, their hundred moods at once, their nerves, their baggage they have brought in from home, from earlier in their days, already fading under the roar of lights and the bodies soon spinning under them.

It starts slow, the part of yourself that stretches to accommodate. Head or heart, depending what you lead with. Game after game, the quick conversations, leaning your back against painted over cement brick walls to settle, mumbling questions to yourself, the growth of bravery in real time. Noticing who is missing, missing them, getting to feel strangely fond of the back of people’s heads for where they situate themselves in presser rooms, in tight semi-circles around a player you all just watched take gravity and break it across his knee. Pretty soon you are slipping into a whole other body when you go down those stairs, into the tunnels. And when you leave, bone-tired but so, so happy, too keyed up to sleep, knowing how strange you must look if anyone on the train at that time was even paying attention, you already miss it.

There’s no choice now but to wait. Whatever your plans were, the degree to which you entrusted your future to where you saw it going. It could be a pause, it could also be the end of something. Selfishly, I have no idea how long it will be until basketball games will happen like they were 100 days ago. Years? And, like, being a writer not firmly fixed to a team, an outlet, my scrappiness doesn’t make me very safe in whatever coming back looks like. More than all that, with every day the pandemic doesn’t wane into a second wave because the first is still rising, none of this should be moving forward.

Dylan looked up the other day and said, “We missed spring”, and where it might have once caved my chest in for a minute, I only nodded. We have, we did. I’m writing this on the summer solstice. Time’s left us. Unspooled, gone galloping off toward a sun that stays fixed, hovering at the horizon weeping runnels of gold. To want something now, to yearn for anything, is to agree to a silent, almost impossible pact with yourself because there’s no way to place it in a possible future. There is something incredible and wrenching about that, something very true. It’s a quality of patience rarely tested, coiled way down deep as much as it is your whole self, blown open, guts and where you’re guileless on display. To want and to wait is to treat your body like a live wire, your heart permanently prone, it’s also a fundamental and cyclical balance in being a person. We can’t help but cast our hopes out like lines at twilight and trawl, too much than is sometimes good for us, for what we hope to haul up, hardly materialised. The habit of wanting and waiting is hard to quit, thank god.