For the last few days, I’ve been shooting basketball again. 

This is not a habit that I have had since I was twelve years old. Back then, I used to go out and shoot on a rusted hoop from the 90’s in front of my grandpa’s house. It was missing most of the net, and what was left was in tattered pieces, but nonetheless, me and my brother continued to play horse on it until my grandpa finally took it down around the time that we lived out-of-state. I also played games at my grandparents house in Fort Bragg, standing on the sandy white graveled driveway, taking turns with my cousin and brother. We’d try to shoot from half-court, deciding that half-court was wherever we wanted it to be; out in the grass somewhere, or near the dog houses that always smelled wet with mildew, or next to the wooden clubhouse with a yellow slide across the yard. That expanse of red-wood lined property felt like it encompassed the whole world, back when my world was vast and tiny at the same time.

I started shooting baskets again when my friends visited this weekend. We had one of the best days that I’ve had in a while, a languid early summer day where we laid out by the pool and gossipped in the water and ended the day with dinner and ice cream. My boyfriend noticed a hoop in our tennis court, and he bought a ball at the Target up the street, and we ended up playing horse on the court as the sun set blissfully late. At first, I was timid, scared of the ball, but then my boyfriend gave me some pointers for shooting, and soon, I was sweat-slicked and grinning, mosquito bitten and yet happier than I’d been in a long while. I wasn’t sure what made me so happy until much later, when I was laying in bed falling into a slow sleep: for the first time in a long time, I felt like my younger self again. 

Yesterday, at a book club meeting, someone brought up how trauma makes you feel so mature in some ways, and yet so stunted in others. I think that I spent so much of my precious, short childhood feeling like I had to grow up. As the eldest daughter of a single teen mom, I felt the weight of raising children on my shoulders. I felt like I was already a mother, already married to my family, already a grown girl-woman-thing at just twelve-years-old. Subconsciously, I felt that I should be the best, do the best, prove people wrong about the girls of teen moms. I suppose that this is where my lifelong perfectionism started, a trait with which I have a love-hate relationship. To say that I was always a stoic adultlike child would be wrong, of course. Those eighteen years of childhood had moments of reckless abandon, freedom, and whimsy, most of which happened on my grandparents property out on Mitchell Creek in Fort Bragg. But they were also full of angst and parenting my own parents and feeling the pressure of the world on my shoulders. In the simplest language, my early years were full of trauma. I even have the recurring nightmares to prove it. 

Now, at nearly thirty, I am trying to reclaim my childhood and my childlike wonder. I buy myself the stuffed animals and trinkets that my family could never afford to get for me. I return to the books and TV shows that felt like a release throughout those eighteen years. As I return to these pieces of art, I collect pieces of the girl that sat and watched these same shows or read these same words so many times. I listen to the music of my childhood; India.Arie and Lyfe Jennings and Ciara and Ashanti and Tupac and all other manner of 90’s and early 00’s R&B and rap. I color in coloring books and do puzzles and play boardgames. I go for long, meandering walks on the nature preserve upon which my apartment sits. I sit on the grass and stare up at the clouds in the sky and try to find shapes in them. I listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks or sermons or, on the most holy of days, nothing but my own thoughts, the music of the birds in the trees the only melody that I need. I thank God and source and creation that I have been able to enjoy this day, this walk, this moment. That after so many years of fighting behind and ahead, I have just one moment of peace, however fleeting it may be. 

I was never a sporty kid. I played basketball for exactly one season in third grade, and my mom said that she had to suppress laughs as I skid along the court searching for the ball, running like Phoebe in Friends. During P.E., I made excuses to walk the mile, and I trembled with fear when it was my turn to swing the bat during softball, trying my best to continually be at the back of the line until the blessed bell set me free. But from an early age, I liked the way that vigorous activity, like shooting baskets with no game in sight or walk-running around my block or stretching my body or climbing trees, finally quieted my always loud brain. All of the static went out, like someone had shut out the lights in a once bright room, and sacred darkness followed, candles of creativity lit throughout my head. This was what drew me to shooting baskets, to horse riding, to running. This is what continues to push me to the gym, to yoga practice, to go on walks. This is what found me shooting baskets every day over Memorial Day weekend, leaving my arms like jelly today. The bounce of the ball against the concrete, the mathematical precision of the aim, the joy of it swooshing through the net. These things bring me back, and I feel the chasm between my late-twenties self and my childhood self loosening. 

Yesterday, as I shot baskets, I remembered my father taking me to the basketball court up the street from our trailer in Live Oak. Some of my earliest memories are of him lifting me up on his shoulders so that I could shoot a basket, and how big he seemed even though he was only 5’7. I still remember his half-moon grin and his guffawing laugh and the wrinkles around his eyes and how it felt like he could do no wrong, like he knew the answer to everything. Strange to think that he was just in his early twenties then, just a boy-man with trauma that he did not know how to process and calloused careless hands. Strange to think that those would be some of my final happy memories with him before he was taken away too young, first by drugs and then by a speeding train. 

I cannot bring him back, and that hole is something that I will have to spend the rest of my life reconciling, through prayer, through therapy, through coming back to my body and myself after a long time away. But through the rhythmic pounding of the basketball, I can keep his memory, and the memory of that little girl, pigtails in her hair and brown eyes full of wonder, alive. Each time I dribble and shoot, I feel his hands in the movement of my own. Each time I smile at making a basket or curse at a missed hoop, I feel his voice speaking through me. Each time the ball flies through the air, landing wherever it may, I loosen my control. I lean on something larger than myself. And perhaps most importantly, I feel my childhood self there, standing next to me, happy to see that I am still doing the things that we love. I hope that I am making her proud.