My parents have been sending photos from Japan. Photos of the baby, how big he is in their arms, against their chests, even against my brother. Photos of the baby eating, reaching out to happily palm their faces, laughing, wearing a bucket hat, hoisting himself up on his front arms and watching them take photos. Photos of frothy cherry blossoms in the south, where they are and we were almost exactly a year ago all together, gentled open by the sunnier days and warmer weather of Shikoku, a small island nestled against the West flank of a bigger island. Photos of them taking photos of the cherry blossoms. Photos of the small stony backyard with my brother’s greenhouse and new patches of tilled soil where he and my mom have planted a few small trees.
My dad re-sends me many of the same photos, forgetting they all came through the family group chat. Now I have their memories doubled, sometimes only hours but other times a couple days later. I test my own memory of whether they’re new and the baby is in the same clothes, or they were sent already. A guessing game of borrowed remembrance against a backdrop of green — sword-shaped leaves of spring’s first irises, the blanket of trees on the mountains around the city that nudge into the background, fresh peas smeared across the baby’s monumental cheeks.
When RJ Barrett walked onto the floor for the Raptors starting lineup announcement, his first time back in uniform, back on the court, since the sudden death of his younger brother in March, Garrett Temple was waiting at the end of the line to wrap him up in his arms.
I watched from above the court in the press box as Temple slipped his hand up from gripping Barrett’s shoulder to cradle the back of his head, holding it there as he spoke into Barrett’s ear. The seconds drew out, lasted long enough that smoke from the fireworks blasting from the backboards started to stretch and sink down in long ribbons toward the crowd.
When Temple let Barrett go it was with the same softness. Almost as if they were drifting. Lifting his head from Temple’s chest, Barrett blinked a few times against the pulsing lights, set to gold for the theme of the night, his cheeks cast to bronze. All along the announcer continued ringing off names of Toronto’s starters, booming from the speaker stacks, but there was something about the space showing between them, where their bodies pulled apart, like the rest of the arena, with its noise and purpose, crept back in and time came with it, revving back to present.
Joel Embiid said he’s glad to be out of the MVP race this season, that the race and the conversation around it has been toxic for a long time. I believe him. I also believe him when he said in the next beat, with the last of the same breath, that the competition has been boring this year and could use some toxicity. The joke is that he means from him.
I believe him on both levels because he spent the last two months watching and, in all likelihood, oscillating.
When you lose a job, willingly or not, you sit outside of your life for a while. The routine you made around that work, the identity that sprang from it no matter your approach to work as personal identifier or work a thing you kept at arm’s-length, ceases to exist. You forget yourself. There can be a sense that everyone else is forgetting you, too.
It isn’t only the sudden lack of structure that makes you drift, it’s the realization that what we pour into work out of a desire to create, change, sometimes just cede the days, is still temporary no matter how long we do it or how hard we try. There is lasting work, to be sure, but your part in it will always end. It strikes me to be an even more transient thing, the work of the body that Embiid and all athletes do. Individual game stats, team wins and losses, these are shallow stamps in the ephemeral nature of the work, invoking some permanence in an NBA season, but those markers will be blurred by the postseason, and whatever happens in the postseason blurred by the season that follows.
Embiid also shared that this injury hit him harder than any of his others,
Usually, when I have injuries, I just tell myself, ‘Move on to the next one. Get better and fix it.’ This one, it took a toll mentally. Being depressed. It was not a good one. Still not where I’m supposed to be, especially mentally.
To watch his peers in their physical work, or his teammates each night playing around his missing outline — at first, gaping, and then, through necessity, shrunk and patched over as lineups and schemes adjusted — would be like a whole-body phantom limb syndrome.
Embiid’s oscillation was going from the physical work to muscle memory, then to memory of muscles that grew fainter each day. From bruising, real-time collisions — his body pummelling into another under the rim, or velocity’s lurch against his chest going from sprinting to pulling up short for a shot — to the hint of a touch, like a ghostly shudder along the spine.
If he was watching games before he could start to rehab, or as his recovery progressed (alone with trainers, initially outside his team’s orbit of physicality — and that physicality isn’t just on the floor, it extends to being jostled along together on team busses, squeezing into plane seats side-by-side, running drills, slapping shoulders and backs in practice, seeing each other’s outlines through the steam of showers, sitting idle together in locker rooms before and after games), his drifting likely deepened. For Embiid, it wouldn’t just be the intellectual understanding that he was taken out of something (and unlike losing a traditional job, he hadn’t been “let go”) to make him feel out of step, removed from routine. It would be a bodily abstraction, too.
What a weird sensation it must be, to feel your brain and body sever. Tug you in the same direction, wanting the same result, but to feel both as wholly separate entities with different urgencies and motivations. After two months but hardly needing that long, I can understand Embiid’s thought process forking.
One split, out self-protection, is how I interpret him saying he’s glad to be out of the MVP conversation. More so given the new qualification as of this season, that awards hinge on the physical presence of a player, specifically, 65 in-game contributions of their bodily work, for a minimum of 20 minutes at a time. Another split, like Embiid talking himself back into the world of the body his injury removed him from, is his simultaneous suggestion things would be welcomely more toxic if he’d been around these last two months. Nudging his body back into the NBA’s routine with a smug little smile, as if to say, Remember me?
His answer’s not long. Under 40 seconds. But in it you can hear the brain and the body circling the other and coming to grips. A vocal equivalent of the Predator handshake, there in coy duality.
Standing with Dan in the whipping wind beside Scotiabank arena, shouting through slashes of rain about reach, about what passes for good writing, about, really, connection.
People are more reluctant to pay for art, I say, sidestepping a cluster of puddles glowing in the lambent light of the arena’s giant signage.
I don’t think so, Dan shakes his head under his hood. News is free! He raises his voice over a fresh gust of wind.
The tops of the financial towers rising on all sides are shrouded in luminous fog. A straight shot west two blocks on the street that ends where we’re standing, SkyDome sits obscured in the same thick mist, the only hint of it lurking is a horizontally oriented half-moon of glowing blue.
I love your city, Dan repeats for the 3rd or 5th time since he crossed Darvin Ham’s pregame to give me a hug. After the game and the postgames, we sat in a bar beside the arena talking about books and basketball, people and life, until they kicked us out. He asked me what it was like to grow up in Toronto and I realize all the time we’ve spent together has been in running around or running into each other in other cities, far from both our homes and histories. It stalls me, zeroing into the present, this city and its dormant decades of my past, swimming in flashing glimpses to the surface where it becomes up to me to decide what to share and how to snare it. My mind automatically moves to sum up the entire experience of my early life, versus just saying, like, “fun”.
I’ll definitely be moving my family here, Dan laughs, rain patterned across his glasses and his eyes behind them squinting at the joke of his earlier exuberance. Dan’s eyes, usually squinting in a laugh, a joke, a smile, close listening. What a comfort.
I feel more heartened in that bad weather and good company than I have for days. We strain into the wind and I feel it as nothing, as habit, as an animal coming back to composure in the days drawing long again and the air offering a lively current of what’s to come. Another green season.