we can say what it feels when we describe it, get it all down to the
xxxxxxxxxxpoint of it being all y’all all
over the damn place. It feels terribly beautiful. It feels terribly beauti-
xxxxxxxxxxful. Everywhere you went.
—Fred Moten, “Index” in The Hundreds
Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart
I haven’t been sleeping well and I’ve been missing games.
Thursday night I woke up at two a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. Did I even want to? I tossed and turned and then by five, I decided, fuck it, I’ll properly wake up and work, which is, terrifyingly, the only thing these days that makes anything feel “worth” “it.” I get up and make it through the day by doing the things I had planned to do (run, edit an essay, file a short review, attend a dissertation defense, therapy, call my dad), and certain other things I hadn’t planned to do (leave early, skip a meeting, get my nails painted banana yellow, try on platform Celine sandals at an outlet, order pizza, cry). By game time, having been awake for fifteen hours, I was exhausted again. After eating dinner on the couch (I always eat dinner on the couch), I moved to my bed and put the Raptors vs. Magic game on. Game three. I wanted to be all like, pLaYoFfS bAbYyYyYyYyyy but I had no energy for nervous celebration. Instead, I kept up with what seems like ordinary encounters, non-events. I like team sports for what they say about how we all might work together under duress and constraint. Action in relation. I mean, I was genuinely moved by the way we were moving the ball. Passes like a stone skipping over water. Sometime in the second quarter, as our initial rocketed lead was getting smaller and smaller, I fell asleep.
I wake up at two. a.m. again and do the one thing the wellness blogs tell me I’m not supposed to when I can’t sleep: gravitate to the blue light. I open up a text from my friend, which had a screenshot of a headline “Raptors survive for 2-1 lead over Magic” and a question: “Can the raptors do more than survive?” He’s not a fan like me. In my two a.m. fog, scared I’d never sleep again, I retorted, “Can any of us do more than survive?”
It turns out we can, and we do. Even if most of the time it doesn’t feel like that. Some days I think a win is a win no matter how it comes to you. But, no. Because to “survive” a win is to recognize that winning takes from us. Because winning can take a lot out of us, from us, away from us. We can get away from ourselves. Especially when we’re not at home. (The crowd in Orlando was loud; it was their first playoff game since 2012.)
How is winning a struggle over who has the right to live?
Somewhere, somehow something was still lost. After all, the antonym of “loss” could be “win” but also “recovery”—that slow, never-ending approach to life that attempts to grasp the ungraspable.
PASCAL SIAKAM THOUGH. THIRTY FUCKING POINTS. ELEVEN REBOUNDS. CAREER HIGH, and I learn this morning, now he’s up there with Chris Bosh as the only player in Raptors history to make those numbers in a playoff game. (Wow. Do I like numbers?) In a post-game interview, Pskills cites his family for keeping him grounded and the “African kids” he’s doing this all for, getting us sucked into the dreams of some multiculti future that never arrives. Still, when I watch Kyle Lowry throw that rainbowed half-court pass to Siakam, I’m like sign me up. Liberalism won’t let us forget that Siakam is a product of global development (and thus its violence): he went to NBA’s Basketball Without Borders camp and has only been playing “organized basketball” for seven years. I like the sound of disorganized basketball, it reminds me of the undercommons, of disorganized study. But for some, study becomes just another fucking job. And basketball, too, is a job but if we’re lucky, other shit can happen on professionalization’s back.
So long / good morning from my bed. Finally I can leave my windows open at night. The breeze is fresh, all my lamps are lit, and I’m listening to Celine Dion. xx
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