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Where does the body end and immortality begin? We wanted to find out.
To us, basketball was a historical record of all the ways a body can move with and for another.
What could be better than the strange and perverse pleasure of being known?
on an elemental level, she was different from me. She probably had a boyfriend; she probably actually liked her boyfriend. Wanted his lips on hers, his hands up her shirt in the back row of a movie theater. I didn’t know what that was like. To desire something so dull, something so easily attainable.
This was how he loved me best: through basketball, his pride and joy.
It occurred to me that most spectators only like athletes for what they can give them: money, pride, excitement, and entertainment. Otherwise, they’ll write them off faster than the time it takes AI to shake a defender.
All my life I’d wanted to get a full scholarship to play D-I basketball. I wanted to be a champion, I wanted to be loved; I assumed they were the same thing.
How badly do you have to want something in order to get it? What about someone? Is there a limit to desire? And what happens when you reach it?
I didn’t care how much damage I did to my body. I was trading the future for the present at a remarkable pace.
“How else do you silence something as loud as perfectionism?”
Watching her made me feel like anything was possible, like there was an absence in me only she could fill. The very thought made me quiver. No one should have that much power.
I didn’t understand why people like that had children. If I ever had children, I’d lift them up so high sky watchers would mistake them for stars.
The only act of love I knew how to reliably give: basketball.
the eerie morbidity of childhood, how you either could not imagine dying or imagined dying all the time; there was never any in-between.
We wanted to become small gods, to be invincible, transcendent; we would outlive the record books, the thousand-point banners, all the imperfect technology tasked with remembering us.
