With the 18th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... MISCHIEVOUS
Steph’s getting into her car and hesitates, asks me if there’s anything else. I feel tears crowding up against my lower lids. After 21 years you have to come to terms with someone knowing your tells.
The hop-skip of my emotions right now, on any given day. Time slinking by in my peripheral vision. The past couple months I’ve had the strange sensation of a figure, or a shape, or a trick of light, but when I move my head the fraction of the turn it would take to catch it, nothing’s there. I think about what losing it looks like. What I mean is will I recognize it.
In Old French it meant sinister, inherit wickedness, an affliction that would lead right to ruin. Now it’s something we equate to kittens or light pranks. Swapping out sugar for salt. Changing the time on somebody. Now the latter wouldn’t even count, and there’s no one who’s lived through the last six months that would call it a prank.
Through our cinematic framing of nature, even in violence, it blurs. Becomes the shroud around intent, the scene that cuts away before the kill. Propelled by necessity. Even certain animals lend better to it. Weasels. Those curving, low bodies, made to slink. Hawks and owls, every appendage on them meant to rend, herons stalking with spears, crows yanking whatever’s left from bone. Birds can be the worst of them but the second they lift, over the trees, out of sight, they seem to take the blood with them. Ours, lifting, and the fresh red brushstrokes across their beaks.
In a legal sense, a problem only when proved intentional, a crime. Where violence and terror are premeditated, the blanket of it, that plucky version of we picture — a person on tip-toe, peeking over a fence; fireworks set off in the middle of the street with a whoop and thudding pummel of feet quick away through smoke — can no longer cover it.
Still, as a word, it is softening.
People are adept at this. This watering down, lessening of severity, the gradual and complete boiling away of what was once harmful. It makes for easier living. It also makes for the eventual lowering of any and all barriers capable of diverting or deflecting our pathways through life. Whether we are better off for it or not, we can’t seem to slake our propensity for buffing away any edge that would snag us for even a second. Do I want to get ripped apart by life? No. But without points to sharpen against the whole thing rolls shapelessly along, a tumble of days, accelerated years. You’re right, I’m thinking more about death lately.
My safety has always been to tease. The sharp feint of it a gauge. Does the person duck, recover, are they nimble enough volley back. Do they shut down, because I dug too deep, aimed too close, do they tell me this, do they tumble into their own head. Or do they rear back, gathering themselves for violence. It’s not the best way to get a sense of kind, I know. You can never tell what’s been going on with somebody, out loud or inside, and if you start with a prod rather than a palm open, asking, there can be damage. But I can’t say it hasn’t always proved an accelerator. To affection, to shorthands — coded and warm, easy language — hurdling quick and breathless into a relationship gathering speed, trust. To a difference pretty deep, impossible to cross but with enough room to stand on either end of the chasm and watch for the other, wish for each other. To painful things I’d rather forget but, trauma rarely lays its head down without keeping one eye open for you. There’s only been one person who took to my teasing with a sneering cruelty, his intent, always, to scare me, shake me up so he could slam me back down. As if it were not possible to say, enough. And even when I knew, saw the arch in his eyebrow, the lift of a lip in a creeping smile, that very reliably marked his already jumping ahead to payback, I pushed. I think you push when you are trapped. When you have lost most of your autonomy, especially over yourself. When you’ve wound up in the very snare you helped to set, even placed your foot very gingerly in. The impulse of last resort.
Lance Stephenson used it as an excuse. On court he could blow in LeBron’s ear, play air guitar, make big, cartoony poses of confusion and toughness at refs. He could use distraction as deflection from the kind of specifically menacing violence he was good at. Groping a minor. Pushing his girlfriend down a flight of stairs, slamming her head against the bottom step. You’re probably familiar with both, I hope you are. But have you thought about the physics of Stephenson, following closely enough, maybe one step behind, already understanding what he had to do, how he had to move, to be there behind her when she finally escaped his initial exerted force, so he could inflict, with clenching, gruesome intention, more. Still, these were footnotes. The prospect of him was always enticing enough to paint him as his own impasse. No matter how his career ends he will always hold the starting position of prankster. Someone who simply “could not get out of his own way” whereas I can’t get, when I think about him, the faint tang of metal, of blood, from my mouth.
Kyle Lowry uses it as a handshake. Proof of getting past his invisible and closely guarded line of total loyalty. Lowry wailing like Slimer outside the fake window in the background of DeRozan’s All-Star photoshoot. Lowry shoving his hands in the space between DeRozan’s arms and body from behind during a postgame interview and miming the words he was saying to the camera. Lowry helicoptering a towel around his head from the bench, another towel tied around his forehead, warmup jacket zipped up to his all-tooth grin, flashing like a lighthouse. The easier he gets with every season the softer his jokes, his nature not any different but with less of the trappings, he’s not trying to deflect anything, anymore. His play, his ribs, tickling. Inclined to barb only if you get too close — a bad question, lazy insight, wrong look — to someone he’s set out to protect.
Cagey. I hate how much I’ve come to encompass the word, even bodily. Tense, seized up, even my teeth feel on edge, glinting, extra sharp. July yields some of the most beautiful sunsets in this city. Neon cotton candy pink clouds over washed teal, so thin the sky seems stretched, straining. Layers of orange, grape, pink, like a cheap airbrushed t-shirt sold on a boardwalk somewhere. Hammered gold and cobalt, Campari red against air just as thick, sweet. A trembling cornflower blue crosshatched with chemtrails. All these evenings, looking up, wondering why I can’t catch my breath. Thinking how much I loved summer sunsets. Thinking, why am I thinking about this in past tense if there’s one fading to pitch right above me.
Time flies when not much happening, my mom texts.
I can’t think of the last time I read something so true, that folds in the snatching of time, all these lost hours, with the one word left off. And I’m reading two books a week.