Throwing a Football To Myself

Essays

Sep 14

I never thought I was lonely growing up. I had lots of friends, but I spent a lot of time by myself for someone with that many friends. I didn’t realize how easily I was overstimulated by gaggles of children at the time. I went to birthday parties even though I would rather have hidden in the bathroom unless it was a dodgeball party. As long as I was playing sports, everything was fine. Sitting around in a crowd was not fine.

When I was at the pink house, I played football alone in the front yard for hours. I was the quarterback, the running back, and the wide receiver. No one cared about tight ends back then. I would deke and jive through ghostly defenders and mark down the statistics on a nearby sheet of paper. I threw bombs to myself and caught them. I was every player. I played entire seasons in that yard.

I always liked a cocoon, so it’s not as much an issue for me to hibernate. I don’t crave what others crave. I prefer texting myself, but there’s nothing quite like driving to Carvel in your pajamas, with pimple cream on your face, with your best friend at 9:42 PM on a Saturday night.

I see a universe of people playing self-effacing games in their home offices, wondering why the universe is so uncaring. I understand the sentiment, but the universe is just waiting for them to do something. It’s waiting for us to stop wallowing and reconnect with a past that existed before the technological advances that have led us so astray.

I say this as someone who gets upset when a webpage doesn’t load in .001 seconds. I am part of the problem. I take my phone on walks. I look at my phone at stoplights. I text to avoid talking to anyone on the phone. I am in my own shell, but I don’t know if I am the type of person who needs to get out. Some turtles prefer to turtle, but maybe you don’t.

Maybe you don’t want to be that kid throwing a baseball up in the air and then running and diving to catch it. Maybe you don’t want to be that kid who hit a tennis ball against a pink garage for hours, completing full versions of the U.S. Open in an afternoon, brackets and all. Maybe you want less solitude. I get a strange satisfaction out of solitude. You don’t have to.

The reason I threw a football to myself so much was that when I played with others, the rules were always different. I was forced to stray from my spectrum to accommodate others, and it usually ended up with a cacophony of angst in my head. Structured sports with umpires and referees worked because they had a set of rules to follow. Stoopball and half-tackle football on a car-lined street in Brooklyn Heights make their own rules daily. Car!

I used to wonder if I was just making excuses for being lonely. Then I went to a mall again. Nothing I had ever said in my life had been an excuse. The tightrope walk of being human, for me, made other people en masse seem like an impish kid banging a gong while wearing headphones and also kicking at his parents as they tried to grab his seventh Go-GURT out of his slippery hands.