Match Point

in high school, my tennis coach had me play a match against the best singles player in the county. as I tossed serves, having them hit back to me with a precision that will break your heart, I knew I was supposed to lose. and that was okay - the adrenaline rush of merely playing against such talent was enough. when I left the court, my coach said, you did great. those words might have been fluff, but they probably weren't - I had won many points regardless of her finesse. I had won in some subtle, incredible way.

but words don't often wrap everything up in neat bow.

fast forward merely four years later. one of the first friends of mine who told me "I love you" is suffering. after she died, I walked around my college's town green, and sometimes, I still get stuck there. her words to me before she died: "if this doesn't work out, I don't know what I'm going to do" seemed like they already had an answer. had I missed the point, not paid enough attention to their meaning?

sometimes, I think words pay a penance after they are said. they become the loaded stuff of memories, a gun we were never taught how to use, now just smoking and empty of bullets. they are undoable. sometimes, I wonder if I could have said something, could have made one word sound more believable than pain.

maybe she would laugh now, say I'm being dramatic. maybe that's in the universe where she didn't have Bipolar Type I, the kind that decreases your life expectancy by ten years with an almost 20% mortality rate. maybe I'm remembering the words she told me before she died incorrectly. maybe all we have with words is hope that they aren't somehow skewed, or just shadows of the truth.

back to tennis. I felt my most powerful serving - what I was best at. I almost never lost. I had an almost perfect record, I was in varsity. but what if my memory doesn't 'serve' me?

what if the coach only told me I "did great" because he wanted me to feel better?

how do we ever really know what words really mean, if we could have done anything differently, something to stop them from playing a loop in our memories like old black and white films of the past?

words are almost always subjective.

indeed, whenever we use "he/she/I said" in our writing, perhaps we're trespassing into unspeakable territory. maybe we can never really relay what was actually said. we can never interpret it 100% correctly. memory doesn't always serve. the only thing we can really do is serve what we think to be match point.