With the 29th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... JEALOUSY
We’ve lost a lot of things to Covid but jealousy’s been one thing I don’t mind slipping away. Yes, there are still the radar-blip catches of envy that come in reading, seeing, scrolling, the triggers best brushed aside because what does dwelling do other than notch a small knick in you, force a steady and almost certain deflation. But the bigger, swelling bursts of longing, or resentment, who knew those would go so quiet in a pandemic?
Covid hasn’t been a leveller, we know that by now, but with feelings maybe it gets close. Knocking off the edges of the sharper, rousing rushes, softening our reactions through the slippage of time. How every day blends into the next, more or less the same if you are lucky. You keep a closer circle, you check in on friends as far as you can remember to, and everyone else is more or less doing the same. In all that, between the new-formed habits of safety and necessity, and the held-over habits of sanity, there just isn’t a lot of room to go green-eyed, with gusto, in the same way you might have a year ago. What we want, now, is more or less the same: for things to be as they were. And if we can’t remember what that was like, then, to move as gracefully as we can with as much clarity as we have into what comes next.
A year ago the Raptors got their rings. I was in the arena, it was my birthday — same as today, strange as it feels — the lights went down and the voices, 20,000 of them, went up. It was expectation meeting with the holdover joy of June’s championship celebration. Maybe more realistically the joy that hadn’t tapered off yet.
Thinking about it now what seems most surreal, besides that many people crammed in one enclosed space, was how purposeful the entire thing was. Ceremony is a kind of distillation of mood, purpose permeating in its symbols. Rings slipped over fingers, fingers fanning out in front of faces, the motion of reward.
I loved that night for the reactions of each person. Serge Ibaka leaning into Marc Gasol, the both of them smiling with faraway eyes down at their fingers. Pascal Siakam staring solemnly up into the rafters where the championship banner, trimmed in gold, trembled in spotlights. Kyle Lowry grinning so hard my own face hurt. The ceremony, simplified, was action and its reward. Win a title, get a ring. But effused in every movement were waves of heightened, complex feelings, rolling off each and every person standing on the court staring at their ring. Add another layer for every fan, or front of house arena worker, team staff, standing in that space, heady and roiling with reward.
I am jealous of that night as much as I am of any recent memory, before this past March, that buzzed and ran over with so many feelings, free and flush like a tap that’s left on, with no inclination of ever running out. Full-throttle feelings, so strong they knock the air out of you, not tied to grief or fear, to the dulling buzz of a ceaseless, permeating anxiety. I revisit them more infrequently for fear of losing them a little with every new replay, the colours dimming out, the tactile points — smell, sight, sound — smoothing, fading. I guard them, now, jealously.
I thought maybe to write about Jimmy Butler when planning how to approach this feeling. Short of the ring he had exploded toward, a ring that was still more important to him than the place he had elevated himself to on the NBA’s stage via sheer will and exhaustive effort, a career now marked as significant, worth watching, the eye test for that obviously faulty.
But then I saw Jimmy on a boat, putting up shots, somewhere out where the Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean all flow into each other in endless cerulean. Jimmy taking video at dusk looking back on the lights of Miami, south Florida’s signature boiling clouds in cool whip mounds tinged in hot pink, the sky gone layers of lavender. Jimmy taking stock of where he was, his actions light, free, clear, no envy weighing him down. There’s no jealousy there, there’s nothing but what’s next.
It seems useless, oblivious, to feel sorry for myself having a birthday that doesn’t feel quite right when anyone who has or will in the rest of this year can say the same. That the lack of something you can’t even describe, that missing feeling that makes one day stand out above any other, can’t really, in our current understanding of the world and how we exist in it, occur. Plus, to have a birthday, something to celebrate, in the scope of everything now is its own small luck. A takeaway dinner in the park, folding chairs spaced 6ft apart under maple trees exploding in gold and red as the streetlights turn on, our teeth chattering as the temperature drops. A gift of a bunch of orange tulips opening on the coffee table. Notes and calls coming in from friends across timezones, terrain, picturing their far-flung faces and aching. Cleaning the house because my family can come over for cake. I’m not so deluded to say I am grudging of this, right now, but for years from now when these small gestures and tokens will mean more in remembering the time when they were all there was on one day out of the stream of them, unceasing.