Boundaries, bodies, Boogie
Getting a shard of metal dug out of your eye brings to mind boundaries.
Physical, as in bodily, for sure. Mental, as in how to stretch them for yourself as a spinning steel pin is raised up to your numbed eyeball and you are directed, explicitly, not to “move or blink”. Emotionally, a little later, once the invasive body has been—mostly—removed, instructions on medication, treatment, follow-up given, and you are alone with the rush of ruined adrenalin, the contact inserted to cover the eye now with the small hole in it with a prescription that obscures further your already blurred resolution, standing on a sunny sidewalk and thinking, mostly, what the hell.
In the chop of Georgian Bay I kept losing their heads.
A wave would swell, rise up in front of me and they’d be lost out behind it until I was lifted on the water’s back as it passed under me, rolling me up toward the low skiffing clouds and I’d spot them again, caught in the same patterns, sun flashing from their teeth.
That water feels wild. Caught up in weather not usually fit for freshwater. It races and rolls under an active sky, the channels and chains snaking into it leaking down from Lake Superior. Naturally cold but easily warmed by the sun for how shallow it stays even leagues out from the shore. Sandbanks formed up underfoot so even when the water dogs at your ankles, your chest, your arms, your throat, you aren’t going to be pulled under and out.
Compact little gulls hung in the drafts overhead, heads occasionally tilting to eye the chop. The sun glanced off every wave right before they broke into white caps and unspooled, rushing to shore. On the thin band of beach, sand not swallowed up by water gone high from so many summer storms, my dad stood watching us, waving. The water would spin me, I’d float, hang, dip, get shoved up again and see him still there, still waving with one hand, the other on his phone, recording. It had been cold at first, coming in, how your blood will shy from a new liquid temperature as it is submerged, and even with the wind up it was neither of those things that caught me. Seeing him there so small, watching us, waiting for us, knowing he hadn’t quit smiling and probably talking to us out loud as we got too far out to hear him, my heart crunched hard in my chest.
Fred’s 99th birthday party was winding down back at the house a block up from the beach. Fred, so happy, clutching his hands together at the big counter and thanking everyone for coming. Everyone singing. Fred, ruddy as I’ve ever known him to be since the days back in my Oma and his old garden in the city, Fred pulling up garlic knobs there from the warm dirt by their tall green stalks and popping whole raw cloves in his mouth. One a day, he always told us, that was the trick, and I guess it’s worked. Fred, rosy, cheeks rushing with blood, a month and a half since we’d seen him last and how small he looked then at Fred Jr’s memorial, when he had trouble placing me. Here he’d grabbed my hand and said my name and how glad he was now that I was there.
I stood and tried walking through the water, walking back to shore. The waves had kicked us out at a diagonal, had made it easier to move away from the shore than back to it even in their tumbling rush to get there. Water so active that as the top crashed down around my shoulders everything under the surface was tugging back out. The sudden feeling that you don’t have time for the getting there, only to be there, breathless having made it. I fought it before I just tried to float. Counted out the gaps between swells and caught one, badly, on my belly, back in.
My dad got a video of me coming in from the waves, of course he did. But what I saw was him getting bigger from tiny, fleshed out from a dot on the shore, sun glinting from his Wayfarers, his voice tossed back to me by the gusts on the beach so I snagged just the “eyyyyyyyyyy” part of his signature, leftover days of radio disc jockey voice, “Hey”.
Out in the water, far out, I could see my brother and Dylan standing, maybe wondering where I’d gone and why so fast. When they pushed their legs down under them into the undulating sandbars half their bodies were already up and out and I heard their delayed laughs crashing back at me, surprised.
Wrapped in a towel, dripping over my dad’s phone, he was showing me the videos he took of us out, too far out to see. And with the sun we could hardly see the screen. He was so happy. What is the exact distance of familial love, of your age as you eclipse and shift roles with your parents, the orbit slowing to change as you feel their bodies pushing out into waves where you worry it will be the next big one you’ll lose them in, that snaps like an elastic and yanks you, unyielding, years backward? All that water, 15,000 square kilometres worth, and there wasn’t a place I needed to be faster than out of it. A kid suddenly spooked by the waves and needing to be back not on solid land, but near the legs standing on it, waiting for you. The solid legs I’d spent years in a game with, running my small feet up as he stood holding my arms so my whole body would get somersaulted mid-air on what I figured was just the force of legs that couldn’t be moved.
Doors, she told me, that’s what they found as they dug out the foundation for the house. They were 100ft from Georgian Bay and underneath, only sand. The bungalow they’d bought and torn down had been built on land that slid in around its edges, a live hourglass. Every time that happened the previous owners had dug out another basement, and placed, as a stopgap, a front door. How many had they found? We asked. Oh, dozens. Layers and layers. She was trying to find places in the new house to put them all up, all those pathways down, generations of foundations shifting in and something to open buried beneath your feet.
Boundaries like blood pushing your pulse into your throat, up at your ears, so you can hear your heart thumping back behind your eyes. Your body telling you no, this isn’t right, what’s being said or what you are seeing.
Boundaries like the mechanisms your body has to keep things out, the safety measures that make it go haywire. Sneezing, retching, eyes watering. Boundaries like the front wall of your iris, but what can pass so easily into it. Soft tissue is soft tissue all the same.
I thought I was lucky for swimming all summer. A part of almost every weekend spent in some kind of water—bobbing up, floating on my back, cutting through it like you’re creating your own velocity, the tether to gravity temporarily slackened.
I was lucky for not having a piece of metal go half a millimetre right, tracing the distance along with the doctor across the blown up image of my eyeball, really the distance of his pen cap, smack dab into my pupil.
Sitting in the donut shop a few blocks up from the hospital across from the Central Tech track, picking leftover sprinkles up with the pad of a finger from the consolation donut and blood sugar boost I’d stopped in for, watching the last of the early morning runners finishing their laps, I thought about the plans you make with your body. The silent agreements you enter into under terms like “a lifetime” with every individual part when it’s all working, the begging and pleading and trading off of this for that when it isn’t.
I know what it’s like to be lucky and not have to think about health, how banal it feels, when you have it. When there’s nothing to worry about health is the absence of thought but when it goes, it’s your world shrinking down to one thought on loop, for you or a person you care about.
Plans with your body can just be expectations. First, all the things it does on its own. Breathes, regulates, synapses signal, you want a part of you to move and it does. You think of a decent joke—hopefully, subjectivity is a whole different thing—and you say it. Advance planning can be as immediate as knowing you’re going to go for a run tomorrow, or a professional athlete training for a new season.
Athletes at that level, who train, strengthen, grow more elastic. Who know how to land, to fall, to take impact, whose bodies become intuitive through preparation, are made less fallible by cultivating these physically precise buffers but are still shown, through what always tend to seem, cruelly, like simple missteps, that every plan is bartering.
How this keeps happening to DeMarcus Cousins is the worst kind of proof.
Cousins opted into a league early that seemed so, so eager to have him and ended up on a team that held him out at arm’s length. Punching Patrick Beverly in the stomach aside, Boogie’s tenure with the Kings was injury ridden (Achilles, viral meningitis if you somehow thought the Achilles stuff not serious enough) and just kind of riddled with frustration and suppression. Not to say his behaviour wasn’t contributing, but if you are going to make a commitment to keep a player for seven seasons, then you need to figure out a way to work with what they’re going to bring otherwise you cut them loose a lot sooner. With Cousins, the Kings had to know who they were getting, but chose instead to set him up to take a lot of hard falls and act a little too surprised about it.
Because were those initial seven seasons anywhere close to the way that Cousins pictured his first almost-decade in the league going? Especially if he knew how they were going to affect the rest of his time in it, his whole career’s worth, one that seems to shorten by the season—like, most certainly not.
Cousins is elemental. Some of that is perceived, a mismanagement of accumulated optics over the years, and some of it is inherent. Players who come to mind with similar natures, who have had their stories better handled, are Joel Embiid, Lou Williams, Kyle Lowry, James Harden. Guys for who the stage was always set, but who were shaped, maybe forced, into many roles before they found the natural fit, through a mix of self-awareness and support. As much as bodily health is a bet, when the outcome is against you it helps to have support. To be believed. The story around Cousins is not that he’s a player who has been beset by injuries, it’s that he has become prone.
More prone than someone who doesn’t play basketball? Certainly (although, remember, John Wall ruptured his Achilles by falling down in his house). But more prone than any of those aforementioned guys who also, like Cousins, are elemental because they understand what it is their bodies do? Who know the way their bodies will react when allocated between parameters like where they place themselves, when, who comes at them and how, where the ball is, if it’s moving, in what direction it’s moving and how fast? No. To this rare, living quality that Cousins shares with a rarer few, he is not. The biggest difference between Cousins and other kinetic players is who has stood behind him, or more accurately, the absence of anyone there.
Leaving Sacramento for New Orleans was supposed to be Boogie’s time in the sun. When he got hurt it wasn’t just that he got hurt, it was that he got hurt again. He had to beg back to California, if you believe what my heart still has a hard time with, to find himself a roster spot and a contract basically worth walking around money. He played hardly at all but when he did you could see the same qualities, a bit dusty, but intact. There was no reason to doubt him but still, it crept in. He was leaned on, hugely, in a Finals game he should have been pulled from—but players like Cousins don’t work that way. He knew the steps, knew what was expected. He broke anyway. Because the body will unravel for its own secret reasons, without much care as to where it will leave you and when. And the narrative around it wasn’t the same as it was for Klay Thompson, for Kevin Durant, even for the falling apart in real time like the tin-man Kevon Looney, it was, of course, that Boogie broke down, again.
The optics of this one are even worse. Very dramatically, it happened in service to his country. That’s not even digging that deep into symbolism. It’s also in advance of being back with Anthony Davis, a reunion felt more off-court than on but that’s sort of exactly where Boogie needs it. It’s probably going to be his whole season, and it should be, and that would be fine, if the season after this weren’t so unsure. Best laid plans for Boogie just aren’t, like they don’t take, won’t stick, and it’s heartbreaking because the only one who hasn’t tossed it in is him and at the same time that’s the framing I want for his story. That DeMarcus Cousins is the strongest person he knows.
The last piece of metal to come out was on the third try. I didn’t make a joke about it being the charm because even if it’s my natural inclination to do so to cope, I didn’t want to jinx myself any more than I felt life already had.
What happened was: every scraping out of metal from my iris caused a hole, the negative of tissue, while trying to get at what was. Which was: shards of metal, lodged in.
Every time that happened and some metal stayed, the doctors had to leave it. There’s a point with anything where you have to stop digging. The eye would heal up, rise, tissue grown, and they would try again.
On the last time I felt it. I don’t mean I felt over it, depleted and worn down, though I did. I mean physically, I felt it. That’s how deep the piece was that the numbing eyedrops were only like holding an ice cube on your skin, briefly, before slicing down into it. The surgeon held out a long, long needle, bare handed, and watched my eye through a magnifying lens. The instructions were the same, don’t move, don’t blink, but there was a real pressing down to them this time and I understood why nearly as soon as it started.
It was like etching. Like the last bit of detailing on what’s been revealed in a process of sculpting from marble and just as laborious. He breathed but I didn’t. He kept hitting that tiny piece of metal and flicking, over, urging it out. I did not move, but I did blink. When I did I caught my eyelid on the needle, yanked it back open, knowing what was at stake but also knowing the boundaries of my body which was, at that point, very done.
You push yourself to a point where you can’t and still, you do. You feel the foundations below your feet shifting, like sand going in around the walls or water urging you out when you only want back in. Limits shift, resiliency too, and finally how you frame yourself, how you shore you up. Every break doesn’t mean an end, every injury a hard stop. They can be doors, too. Down into yourself, a rare glimpse backward. So while you heal, feel sorry for yourself, parse away where your boundaries broke, get stronger, you can find the notches and trace what’s true from what’s narrative, the door from the frame.
I want to say I felt it go, but really he said, “There” and leaned back. I was so relieved I apologized. He laughed. Said anyone was coming at his eye with a needle he’d do more than blink. Later, when the numbing wore off, I would feel the absence of it every time I blinked. Sharp and precise pain, a raw opening at the surface. A reminder as automatic as the action of my body doing what I expected of it, carrying on with our agreement like nothing had ever happened.