How It Ends

I was 14 that summer.

The summer before life turned.

The summer that still lives inside me, somehow untouched by the noise of everything that came after.

We had just moved, just close enough that I could still get to the park I knew.

So I did—every day.

The sun was different that year.

It felt like it would never set.

I’d ride my bike to the basketball courts, stopping for a Sunny D at the gas station on the way.

Old heads would let me sub in when they were short.

They’d talk about how quick I was, how I was getting better every day.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the first time I realized:

There was magic in movement.

In the rhythm of a ball on concrete.

In sweat and sunburn.

In a body that felt light, and a brain that still believed in itself.

I dunked once on the 9’10 rim.

I measured it the same day.

No one saw it, but it was real.

A quiet triumph, even if just short.

When school started that fall, I was the new kid.

New faces.

New hallways.

New eyes on me that I didn’t know how to meet.

Girls who noticed me in ways they hadn’t before.

But I was still braces and pimples.

I didn’t know how to be that boy they seemed to see.

Basketball was the only place I knew who I was.

I made the team.

I had the AI Questions that year—red and white, with the honeycomb on the side.

The best I ever was at basketball.

Not because I was the best, but because I didn’t know what else to do but run.

I was the kid with no map.

No plan except to play.

That was enough then.

The freedom of a 14-year-old boy who didn’t know how heavy life could get.

That was the last summer it felt like there wasn’t a weight.

Just possibility.

A breath that still echoes now, in the silence after the ball stops bouncing.