Nameless Sound
A birthday essay
The Knick’s won their first championship game in 53 years about twenty minutes before my 25th birthday. Hundreds of us twenty-something year olds crowded around a large tv, our sweat spreading like dew in the air. Suddenly my friend Michelle is twerking on the tabletop. People outside are climbing street lamps and public buses. Men are hugging each other the way they usually do not. I understand straight men in a way I usually do not.
I am aching to kiss somebody because the song that usually plays during New Years starts playing when we all win. Something that sounds like “Auld Lang Syne” and “New York, NY,” then some JZ of course.
Even the non-basketball lovers are happier than ever at this moment. Something to celebrate, that is ours, that is made of talent and loyalty and pride and also randomness is ours.
The taxi cabs are honking for Jalen Brunson, but I pretend for a few minutes that they’re honking because I am a quarter of a century old on the night when it feels like the twin towers have been resurrected. A win is a win in a sleepless, tightly wound city. We are together for tonight, for a little bit longer than usual. Our joy is my joy. Our win is my win, on a day when I began breathing and crying and wondering.
When I played for my local Jewish basketball league, I shot some baskets in the other team’s basket rather than the one we were supposed to.
I want to win this year. I know I won’t have crowds as loudly chanting or congested and multiplying- but I will have a paper and a pen, a friend, hopefully a lover, and a new sport to pretend to fully comprehend. Timothy Chalamet and Ben Stiller may not be there crying and filming my wins, but plenty of Labrador retrievers will be.
Thunder struck new Rochelle nine minutes before midnight of the next day, a day that was no longer one I was born into. The rain began to wash away something that felt borrowed, fleeting. The act of being celebrated for something you did not choose, especially the year you tried to act against it.
It was the “super” new moon tonight. New beginnings. The moon is closer to the earth than ever tonight. A gravitational pull merges the space between our oppositional forces. The glow-in-the-dark mother of the faraway beyond has embraced our planet tonight, and I am older in spite of it.
Major changes. I’m starting to think my early undergrad poetry portfolio about having a “second puberty” in one’s twenties was not so far off..
Waking up to messages, remembering who isn’t wishing you well anymore even more than those who are, people asking you if you feel different, wiser- it feels like trying on new shoes and then donating them the next day. It feels like saying your name a thousand times over until it sounds like a nameless sound. A weird vibrational riff. A homeless cadence.
And then we move on. I am 25, and so what? It’s Monday now, motherfuckers. The rain has washed away the donated new shoes, the gift cards and the close-eyed wishes. The rain has reminded me that at this fine age, I am no longer the sky or the ground but the rain itself.