With the 6th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... TENDERNESS
It can be hard to be tender.
When you know how hard-edged the world, how unforgiving its margins. Its cruel clefts, snagging boundaries, horizons like mirage. You learn to guard yourself, stay away from where you’ve pushed before. An animal on a tighter and tighter circle until what’s in front is right behind you.
It can be hard to be tender.
When the temperature climbs. When your softest parts get exposed again. Backs of your knees, the long, lighter undersides of your arms, your throat. Eager for the sun, heat, this new air after months inside, months where, even if you were going to be there anyway, felt too guarded to be a natural, unfurling spring. Exposed in this way, all breathing skin, how aware of your body across so many more bare inches as it passes close to other people. How normally, a kinship, an ease, at least in passing through the same swath of sun, feathered shade from the neon green of leaves newly spread open, same grit caught on bare legs from walking in the city. I don’t know your body but I can understand it better through shared stimulus. Now, as the space around us grows, a requirement for what we understand to mean safe, all these bare places we carry feel an exposure. The space we’re in, how open, a confinement.
Lying on the floor with the dogs every night since Victoria Day, it’s felt like. Fireworks, maybe another excuse to be outside at night, as soon as evening hits, the booms ricocheting around the neighbourhood. They get up, circle, perch on primed legs, another pop, they pace, start panting. Captain follows me as I move from room to room and shut all the windows, I almost trip over his large, dark body in the hallway, waiting. George crawls under the coffee table, all his teeth exposed, the creases at the corners of his open mouth look cartoonish for how wide his very unnerved grin.
They can’t settle. George lies down behind me and I can feel the hot puffs of his breath race over my forehead. I reach back and plant my palm on his chest, it heaves.
Animals feel the stress of the people who keep them. Chemicals in their fur, like rings in a tree, can trace back to periods of acute distress. I wonder, on top of the shrieking, flower-bright explosives, how much we’ve placed on them over the past few months, how much they’ve carried for us in their dense, warm bodies, solid as they are, undone by cherry bombs, $2.99 roman candles from the corner store.
Soon they’re on their sides, knocked out by spent adrenalin. In the morning, they’ve burrowed in the blankets, curled into the crooks of our legs. The glancing shift from terror to tender.
We’d hardly gone more than a block when the low, guttural rev of a motorcycle gained on us. The biker pulled up quick to the passenger side. He had a mask on that made the bottom half of his face look like a grinning skeleton, and he was leaning away from his bike, toward the car. We were all idled at a red light.
Warily, I cranked the window down — we’ve been borrowing my mom’s car since my parents got home from being stranded in the South Pacific, a two door, gold Toyota Echo, over 20 years old, no power steering, no power windows, the license plate has a custom frame around it that says HORSE LOVERS ARE STABLE PEOPLE — and sort of steeled myself. The biker’s eyes flashed with concern.
“You dropped something back there!” He shouted over his bike, waving a hand behind us, “Something red, it slid off the roof.”
Confused, we thanked him. The light changed as Dylan and I looked at each other, trying to materialize what the guy could have meant.
A week after we’d had the car it got broken into. The hatchback trunk quit locking maybe eight years ago and my mom never fixed it because she doesn’t keep anything in there besides an ice scraper. Whoever did it had to contort themselves and climb through to the front seats to dump everything — lint roller, handful of elastic bands, stack of years old takeout napkins, insurance binder — from the glovebox onto the passenger seat only to make a disappointed exit. Since then, we’ve kept the plastic binder of insurance information and roadside assistance numbers inside our apartment. Not that it’s worth anything, it just seemed, with my mom’s name and information on it, the most personal thing in the car.
Dylan had set it on the roof as he folded his long body down into the driver’s seat and forgot to reach for it before shutting the door.
We did a lap around the block. A guy in a convertible had pulled over and was hopping in and out of the road like a boxer will when the first bell goes, picking his moment to run for the small red binder lying in the middle lane. Dylan got out and jogged over, the guy nodded at him and raised a hand in a very polite, “Allow me” before ducking out, nabbing it, and rushing back to hand it, smiling, to Dyl.
“Some guy in a huge truck ran right over it!” He exclaimed. He looked so happy.
Dylan thanked him and got back in the idling car. The binder was a little cracked inside on its ancient plastic sleeves, but otherwise intact. We told my mom later and she shrugged it off. But the urgency of the biker, the weird surging joy the guy in the convertible got from getting it, how he slid back into his car, waved backward, and raced away, both were so committed to communicating this anonymous item, their part in returning it. We’ve all been holed up, waiting for the chance to point something out, to assist or partake in some passing, normally forgettable human interaction, out loud and in public — your shoelace is untied, your bag is open, you dropped something.
The insurance binder became a ten minute caper. Action, reaction, just being decent. Insurance, I guess, for kindness. It’s these slight and fleeting instances of human tenderness I find myself so hungry for.
This time last year the Raptors were wrapping it up on the Bucks. I remember the proof of that series, how in a lot of ways it meant more than the Championship. It was the last psychic barrier for Toronto, this slow and torturous climb to the same spot every season that ended in what came to feel inevitable, “almost there” was the best we could hope for.
Toronto winning it was taking a step off the mountain and realizing it didn’t stop. There was more mountain. But I remember best that feeling— breathless, wide open, a little dizzy — and how it was reflected back like a common language in a nod, a grin, the eager initiation of so many conversations between strangers. Doubt was obliterated overnight.
And running through all of it was this undercurrent of warmth, this deep well of softness. You held everyone else in your body because you knew exactly the feeling in theirs and you saved room for the swapping of affection, back and fourth, that was the basis for all that expanding pride. You were all simultaneously brand new in something, figuring out the way to describe it, familiarity growing the more you talked about it, shared it around. There were a lot of reasons the team felt so unstoppable after that, the Championship title a percentage of a possibility. The Raptors shattered that last mental barrier too and as tired as they were, putting the East down for a good long sleep was enough to keep going. But it was the momentum around the team, the warm and overwhelming rush of it, that so many succumbed to. Everyone knew the only thing coming was heartbreak, either the shattering kind after getting that far and losing, or the full-up, choking kind, a heart too full to hold everything if they won. There was a relief in knowing, now, there were only two outcomes left. Nobody in the weeks that followed the ECF win closed up, shut off. The city was fragile, green, demonstrative, aching, all the ways you can arrive at tender, plus ravenous. It was, for a long time, the best I’d ever seen it.
It can be hard to be tender.
Last night I was the only one awake, reading by one lamp in the living room, ceiling fan swishing, windows wide open to the cooling night. The pop of something too sharp to be a roman candle. My heart leapt off my lungs, hit my sternum, felt like. Minutes later, impossibly silent, a firetruck, lights off, slowly crept down the street. An ambulance and squad car after it. A gunshot in the laneway.
This morning, kids in the neighbourhood under the sun, just screaming for the spoil of their voices.
It can be hard to be tender and stay willfully exposed, soft, trying to regulate yourself — pulse, temperature, thoughts, handle on time — but there is an ease in how it can keep you from breaking. You bend, you lighten in the heat, you learn to sit still, breathe slower, save room.