The Tennis Season

I remember Wesley Chiu and I playing matches for almost two and a half hours against every team. It was a tradition for us. We would put our bags down and get our hats out and play long, grueling games as the sky went from blue to dark grey. The rest of the team would sometimes stop by to cheer. There was something normal about it, something ordinary and unsurprising. There were deuces and tiebreakers. The court was laid out in a strict pattern, no bumps and no cracks and no random lines. You knew where to hit the ball. You knew the score. The tennis ball was going back and forth, the opponents right in front of your face, you could watch unorthodox strategies unfolding into chaos. There was always a winner and a loser in the end. There were rules.

I'm sixteen years old, and a junior now, and last year's season has been over for a while now. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this MacBook Air and stare through my incomplete blog and watch Howard drop his half-eaten bagel onto the dirty ground, or Vikas Sharma hitting balls into the forest, and as I write about these events, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. Howard screams of unfairness. Vikas Sharma seconds from smashing the ball into the green forest, his face brown and smiling, and then he rockets it into the trees. The comedic stuff never stops happening: it lives in my head, replaying itself over and over.
   
     But the season wasn't all that way.