This week has been hard: at best, character-building; at worst, a real-life horror story of all five stages of grief but not in any order and sometimes more than one stage simultaneously.
I didn't see it looming, but I should have known. It's June. Daylight extends beyond 8:30pm, and in my bones, the humidity I love to hate is also the precise condition that mark summertime club practices, the season of frisbee, not sidelining or coaching but playing. Running, cutting, throwing, pivoting. And yet, and yet.
Monday, June 3. Club rosters start to materialize, and several of my players made it onto the new women's team in Charleston, one that I helped plug. They thanked me, told me they were so grateful to have tried out against their own doubts, said that I had helped prepare them. The founder/captain of the women's team, a friend and masters' teammate from last year, enthused about our players, their knowledge of ho stack.
Meanwhile Sam's weeknights have grown busy. Disc golf 2-3 times a week, goalty or ultimate otherwise when he feels like it. After 5pm it is often me, the cats, and the hum of the AC in the house, and in that stillness, grief crept upon me.
I cried when he was out. Sobbed again when he came back. Once more at work the next day until that space deep in my ribcage squeezed. I am proud of their success; I love that Sam recognizes the hobbies that fulfill him and devotes time to it. But I am human, so I am selfish, and I'd rather be cleated up and playing myself than hear their updates. Fuck coaching. I was supposed to be on that women's team. (Stage: Anger.) It was supposed to be my season to finally be a player, just a player, and finally get coaching I haven't had since college. No more of the ungrateful college kids in Columbia, feeling alien and unwelcomed on a team into which I poured my own money, sweat, tears, and blood. Fuck them. This was the season for me.
That day also marked the one-year anniversary of my left ACL tear: significant because it meant that I could safely stop wearing my brace to play. One year and with no injury to my left knee - cause for celebration, surely.
And yet I might never play again. My brace sits atop our massage gun, quietly untouched and overlooked.
So this is grief, and I am the fool. For believing I could once again rise above my feelings through hard work alone, as if enough squats could deny the reality of the limitations of my knees now and forever. For stupidly, stupidly stupidly misjudging - fuck, outright trivializing - what it would mean to me to never play again.
I miss playing frisbee. So, so much. So much.
"I know; it's hard," Sam added, sadly, as I broke down. But that's the thing: it's not. It's not hard at all, in the most direct sense of the experience. The workouts, sure. Surgery sucked, yes. And concern disappears quickly after the initial news: expected. Mostly it's lonely. I feel incredibly isolated. Common enough as this injury is, I imagine the loneliness is highly personal. On the outside I look fine. I can walk, I can move, I am independent. But I am unmoored. Somehow I found myself in a one-way exit from this sport, this community*, people I liked, and that is more solitary than I can articulate, even to a partner able-bodied enough to participate.
*I mean this in the larger sense, not simply Columbia. The frisbee community here lacks in ways both significant and not, which only exacerbates the frustration of having two major, career-ending injuries while here. Of all the least worthwhile places! Some fucking sense of humor, really.
Well, I drafted that first part, and then the sadness passed, as it does. It'll return; I have no doubt. But in its absence, I seek other distractions. The hardest part remains, as it has, the weeknights after work, when in an alternate universe I'd be molting on an uneven field, chasing plastic. Mostly I hang out with the cats. (I hang out at home.) I cook. I knocked over a vase one evening, and it took me half an hour to clean. Another time I vacuumed and accidentally sucked up a piece of twine: another half hour then, spent on disassembling the tool. I go on walks, try to make sure that I reach my step goal.
Lately I've been fully immersing myself in fandoms. First it was Chappell Roan, thanks to a recommendation from Joe. I listened to her album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess on repeat, even in Portland in our rental car. I watched her interviews, her MVs, her recent festival appearances. She wore drag on NPR's Tiny Desk, and I read the comments about her intentionally smeared lipstick. Two weeks later, I texted an essay of my thoughts to Joe and passed a recommendation forward to Willie.
Right now it's Good Omens. We finished Season 1, and in my impatience for Sam's schedule to open up to start S2, I got into Staged. New but massive David Tennant / Michael Sheen fan, hello. Now that we've cleared S2 like the Apocalypse was nigh, I'm deep down the rabbit hole of fan theories, scene analyses, S3 speculation - you name it. As an English major (as me), I can't help but appreciate / relish / begrudgingly admire / occasionally find myself astounded by the immense depth to which people will plumb a singular moment. Imagine Mr. Darcy's hand flex in Pride and Prejudice but times that by every A/C interaction. I'm entirely flabbergasted that people do that, but then again, their content - this distraction - is my oxygen.
(It makes me miss my time in the UK. I miss living abroad. I miss feeling a sense of wonderment, a childlike thrill that if I didn't take care, I might look the wrong way for cars and simply broadcast myself as a foreigner. I miss the one time we tried to go to a hole-in-the-wall sushi place near Jiaotong University, only to find it completely boarded up from the inside, a swift, stark pronouncement of gentrification to come.)
A character in search of a new...thing ("hobby" seems too strong), I volunteer at the animal shelter and walk dogs that often have not left their kennels for weeks at a time. Sometimes in their enthusiasm they jump on me, and for a second week I have bruises and cuts. Next month I'll start a pottery class. It's called "beginning throwing," and that is called perfect irony because I am trying to disentangle myself from one thing I learned one time that also started with "beginning throwing" and have somehow wandered into another thing that also, ominously and inauspiciously, starts with "beginning throwing."
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