What’s the opposite of disassociating? What’s associating, so intensely that you can feel the pulse and tenor and weight of every memory of a place hit and sink back into you? Run you flush with love and the people you roared and roamed and smirked and cried and climbed and fell around these hills with? Had the city’s glowing cast of light diffused through fog, salt, leftovers of Gulf hurricanes over your bodies and plans for the night, the weight of the next ten years caught up in the wind and carried off, leaving you all in the care of each other. The boom of the Citadel cannon seemed startling at first, among the bright and quiet clapboard houses, but at some point started to sound in strength with the hammering thuds of our hearts, to soothe and settle us.
Some of it had to be the water. The times we’d take the ferry to get our feet off land, or wander down to Point Pleasant and stand beside trees skinned to toothpicks, still shredded from Hurricane Juan. Once, Jenner and I hopping some low barrier to a boat launch beside a private outdoor stadium pool and Dalhousie’s Marine Biology building to lay on the slanted, crumbling asphalt in waning September sun like some all-inclusive that dropped abrupt into the Atlantic. The pull of the tides, the wild and bright expanse of nothing, just ocean, past where our bleary eyes could squint to. Less dumb promise then hope — the whole of our lives.
We were testing everything but we never pushed up against the boundaries of each other. We were all tender, nipping teeth and coiling close in basement bars with wood floors always sloping under the weight, leaning on each other in streets sloped down to the harbour, our shoulders and backs sloped in the dark with foghorns from the freighters tumbling in through cracked and waterlogged windows. It was an easy love, no pretence. Thrilled, delighted, fierce for each other, with the softest qualities we’d yet to shed.
I think, sometimes, what I haven’t grown out of is that compulsion to coil and gush and go slack with the potential of softness, of running your hands along the belly, the baby hairs, the most vulnerable parts of things. To want that in perpetuity not just for myself, but for the people I love best and barely know. To take their faces in my hands and show them where to look, where the light catches best, to gentle their lives to quiet.
There were dark stretches, too, there had to be. Experiencing both sides of a bad breakup in a one bedroom apartment with rotating friends keeping company beside me on the futon while volatility roiled behind the place’s only thin door. Being slammed up against the wall of an elevator as the doors closed by a mutual friend who was making the same short trip up three floors to the same party, walking on wobbly legs into the friendly din and the warmth of the apartment with him trailing and oscillating between was it funny or did I feel bruises forming. Living through winters that cut, first betrayals that cut, being the bad guy. But the halcyon wash across those years is gold, and I can’t decide if that cast came from green confidence, or being in the power of the people that would come to fill my heart. Probably both.
His crashing bravado, his feints, his underhanded digs, these are waves, the tide rushing to meet your bare ankles, riptides, respectively. Joel Embiid is already broody and roiling as the sea, it isn’t a stretch comparison.
The Philly blues, so desultory depending on the way the light hits, the jersey and his moods. There are these road signs that spring up in northern Quebec and stay on the highways into Nova Scotia, big and wide in cautionary yellow, with a cartoonish storm cloud that’s gained a face and is blowing from its mouth a gale all over the road. The message, even on as calm of September days as we were having, is clear when the car starts to shudder from the wind rushing from the woods, the stretches of marsh, the water. It looks like it was lifted right off of a Dio album and, the more I passed the signs at speed, like Embiid as interpreted by a cartographer on a 17th century map of the sea.
It’s been harder to determine from him what’s been hot air, what’s hurt, what’s a twining cyclone of the two since the Sixers stood, stopped, stared, mostly lost in the last three minutes of Game 7 against the Hawks. In that game Embiid did a lot of glancing over his shoulder, a lot of wading through bodies under the basket, a lot of looking busy waiting. He didn’t give up, not exactly. He’s a tempest, and you can see him already starting to move off, unbidden by whatever unfurling, anchoring reality is fixing fast to his teammates and it’s been like that since. The only thing that’s changed in the scenery since the Sixers fell out and this week, as the team gets ready to dive back in, are the step-and-repeats behind Embiid as he surges while keeping so, so still, a storm on a map that doesn’t quite tell the way anymore.
I know more of the Atlantic then the others. Have more easily lionized the weather it throws from its shoulders, the bright minerality, stinging salt, moody clarity of its water. Feel kinship to its clumsiness, smashing and lifting against itself a breath shy of shore, as much as I do its unassuming cruelty. All oceans might be lonely but the Atlantic doesn’t even feign interest.
It’s not romantic to write about the ocean, it’s compulsion. Some old stirrings of wonder and fear merged to pull. But still, I don’t trust anyone who can’t stand and stare at it, fall into its rolling thrall, who doesn’t feel small, almost grieving, sensing something so hallowed that they fight against throwing their body into it. To think about being dashed to bones against breakers or raked against a rocky shore, to picture how it would feel to be carried, unbidden, on the crest of something that old and unrelenting, to dip their head and come out different.
My furies can be so slow building I don’t notice until they’re broiling up over the soft edges of routine, foaming around a full-body disconnect. But the ocean, its relentless churn taking me by the neck, sloughed it all away.
Where on the map do you put Bradley Beal, Andrew Wiggins, Kyrie Irving, Jonathan Isaac, and even, by the lack of his own conviction, LeBron James? We’d like it to be at the edge, where the flat of it used to drop off (and wait — what did they think happened to the ocean, those terrified circumnavigators? Where was it all spilling out to?) and what could hope to be known quit, but they’ve placed themselves, this sliver the governing body won’t push out, deep in the middle.
Stubborn, stuck, now strangely smug. Beal sitting there asking what was so good, so impressive, about a shot that kept you out of the hospital, with a smile that curled like a cat’s tail. Wiggins, hardly impetuous for the lack of conviction he’s dug his solemn, lonely hole with. Irving, honestly, seems too smart for this shit. Isaac, honestly, doesn’t. And James, holding out as long as he did to get vaccinated to then turn and fan the same flames. What’s the urgency — really? Why are you being pressed so hard? What world, by now, are you living in?
They aren’t at the edge of the map. They are, like the many other ignorant, selfish and indifferent people who feel this way, settled in its centre. They are the ones doodling with real conviction those impossible sea monsters around the margins, too afraid to press forward and face threat, fear, whatever isn’t entirely known yet with the understanding that to navigate the world is to do it alongside other people, for the sake of them. The league needs new maps to follow.
In the morning it’s fog and a kind of quiet, brothy, flat silver plane; in the afternoon the fog has burned off and the water is as deep blue as a promise, as melancholy, with the sun burning clear overhead. One morning, from pale, furious sunrise to noon the water sits as flat as is possible for an ocean, less waves then undulating lifts, and is a shimmering holographic blue. In the evenings the sky washes to soft pastel gradients: plum, a ripe grapefruit around the pith, coral lipstick in need of a touch up, and the water melts to liquid chrome, straining to match, chameleon-like, all that shifting.
It’s a too-brief suspension of time, in that stretch. The water merges with the sky in a trick the eye and brain has trouble telling apart. A between, or caught out span where everything is precipice before night comes crashing and time continues.
I hope there’s a name for it already, that phenomena, and I hope it implies a surfeit of promise, or potential, of lulling in borrowed time. I hope there’s a name already because giving it one clips how expansive the feeling, puts a boundary up where there is none.