The metrics of real life
Our discomfort with Ben Simmons' mental health and our own psychic limbos.
The pleasure in telling dreams. The sense of, here’s what my subconscious unraveled about you as the world went on but I drifted between it and oblivion, someplace where the parts of my life with you in them caught up, overlapped, became the present again.
Out of the blue (that phrase describes the sea of unconscious I imagine them swelling from so well) I dream about Nick. About going to a beach that doesn’t exist, and a cafe — outdoor all year — that couldn’t, in the pocket of the suburbs I was born in and he grew up just beside, Rouge Valley and Malvern. He picks up a rotary phone and makes a prank call, asks on the phone for some kind of salmon dish, the whole fish. The fish comes not long after and we laugh. It’s beautiful. Everyone else there is amazed and pleased. We tear away on a motorcycle and the dream fragments, I come awake out of it, the warmth of resting against Nick’s back on the bike lingering, spreading still, impossible, until I feel Jeans sprawled against me in the quiet of the morning.
Is part of the pleasure of dreaming of people the tightrope between the make-believe of them and reality, and being able to lay with the dream and your own memories unbidden, rushing on you in a tender jumble, your half awake brain without the strength or desire to sort or shove them away? Probably.
I send him a message about the dream. Not for any reason other than to tell him I’m thinking of him. Realizing that the last few times our lives overlapped had their own strange, dreamlike quality. Jon’s wedding, the writhing coil of shadows our friends cast roving around the bonfire on the beach, Roman candles arcing over the lake, reflecting double before tipping down, guttering out against the water. Later, in the pitch dark of northern Ontario, Nick pulling his huge black pickup alongside Shanon and I on the dirt road back to our motel, me trying to shove Captain up into the backseat at least 5 ft up from the ground. Sitting beside him in the spaceship cockpit quality of the cab, quiet enough to hear him breathing as the pines whipped by in black staccato pulses through the rolled down windows, Shanon laughing in the back. Falling asleep to the sound of the river behind the motel with the close, warm quality of knowing people who have loved and known you to varying degrees of intimacy are nearby, their bodies like infrared of the heart, pulsing in the night.
Some of the discomfort with delineation, whether its obvious lack or the process of lines being drawn, is impatience. It can be hard to imagine a place, a state of mind, a feeling, without the clear parameters or poles it exists between. We’re so often best informed by proximity, by what’s closest, that an approximation can feel better than nothing.
In the water, I think of it when I hang for half a second between coming up for air and having expelled everything in my lungs. In the mornings, the groggy bridge between dreaming and awake.
In your own life, so long as your impatience or frustration at existing between things doesn’t project onto the people around you, then that space can be an informative, uncomfortable, enlightening place to sit in. But discomfort take practice and patience, and tends shed from us like bursts of static in winter to whoever we touch first.
And maybe it’s me who’s projecting here. Maybe you’re much better at keeping your insecurities, your disappointments, the ways you envision either falling short or going backward to yourself, all of it firm in the confident grip of the perpetual now. That’s good. That’s ideal. But I still think, considering most religions have staked out an infinite state of suspension — purgatory, hamistagan, barzakh, bardo — between death and an afterlife as a worse option than hell, that it’s still the exception rather than the rule.
This is, for sure, a high stakes way of introducing the apparent discomfort around Ben Simmons’ mental health borne out in the past week, but I wanted to frame it within the delineation of life and death which is, for some, where it resides.
We are very bad at these conversations.
Pair basketball’s, or any pro sport’s need for stark clarity (the neat timed halves and quarters, the stats as base facts, an athlete’s career set to expectations contingent on whatever numerical year they happen to be in) with the never-ceasing discussions to determine that clarity, and why these conversations are so bad make sense — but it doesn’t mean we have to keep having them.
There are no metrics, even when broken down to its barest, electrical impulses, for the behaviour of a brain, but still we would like to place limits on a stranger’s. Legal limits, time limits, negotiational limits, I saw them all floated as desperate lifebuoys to the arguments the people behind them were trying to make. How Simmons would damage the legal basis for the explanation that his mental health was central to his sitting out with the Sixers this season the sooner he hit the floor in Brooklyn (the worry was for the argument itself, not for Simmons). How agents must now be salivating over this being a bargaining chip they’ll be able to use when their clients want to force future trades. How many games was it fair or right for Simmons to take, if he did, before he set foot on the court for the Nets and how, when he said well maybe none, maybe he was ready right away, that became somehow worse.
I still can’t decide if what makes so many people so angry, so uncomfortable, so completely confused by this is that they have no say on the bearing of someone’s brain they’ve determined to be public property, or that the wider discussion this invites is wholly outside the numbers. With Simmons, we’ve seen in one grotesque swoop the limits of athlete autonomy — concept and reality — and our own miserable range of trusting, understanding and accepting the validity and depth of another person’s feelings, indeed entire reality, when it contrasts or conflicts the barest resemblance to our own. I don’t even mean empathy, which the experience of fandom, though rooted entirely in emotion, has always been lacking. I mean the willingness to encounter the space between things another person is inhabiting at any given moment as something more than a holding pattern. To recognize yourself in the wide-open, terrifying vistas of somebody else, and to leave it at that.
When real life, actual real life, gets into basketball, it’s like a wild animal running panicked around the floor. We gawk and point and situate ourselves within the spectacle of it, our understanding rooted in the assumption that it’s an anomaly and that the real thing will resume soon. In other words, we invert reality. Beyond our delusion and to what elaborate lengths we’ll go to sustain it, the better impulse to examine is what secures in us the sense that we are owed the performance, that it’s the thing bound to continue? Other than experience, which the world has done an excellent job of upending in the last two years, our only proof is habit.
In the mix of absurd to sociopathic responses to Simmons being traded to Brooklyn and the likelihood of his playing out the remainder of this season there, the shared note worth zeroing in on is a collective realization of change. Something different happened.
This is only going to keep happening.
Not mirror situations, but new ones, unprecedented in the small and insular world of basketball. You can rage and roil if you want but the best you’ll be doing is spinning your psychic tires, making yourself stuck waiting for a constant that is never coming.
Wait, you thought that was a dream? I was under the assumption you were having a good time when the salmon came out, Nick eventually responds.
The tenderness I feel for people who I’ve left or have left me, our lives drifting how they do, sometimes crushes me in place. But I think of the luck of them, the pleasure of drifting at all. The pin-prick moments of memory in the universe of a life.