Galaxy

There is a box on a shelf in my apartment. I walk past it every day. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, sits a pair of Nike Galaxy Foamposites. I want to say I bought them to close a loop. That is too clean. The story goes back to two magazines my mother bought me when I was in primary school. Before the magazines, there had been a poster and a jersey.

The earliest is a Jordan poster. My aunt bought it for me from a street vendor, sometime around 1998 or 1999. He had just retired, though I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what he had done either. I knew he was the god of basketball. That was enough. I put it on the wall. I didn’t play.

A few years later my primary school held a basketball tournament. Teams picked NBA jerseys. Our class chose the Timberwolves. I still didn’t play. I begged my mother for a jersey anyway. She bought me a Rockets one instead. I think it’s obvious, looking back, why.

Then 2004. My mother and I walked past the train station. Next to it was a block of wholesalers who supplied the newsstands — stacks of magazines tied in twine, open cartons on the sidewalk, a man with a cigarette watching the street. She bought me two: a 2004 NBA Season Opener Guide, and a sneaker magazine with Allen Iverson on the cover in the Reebok Answer 1 — the version with diamonds, or what I remember as diamonds.

I took the magazines home and read them. I learned what a queue was. I learned what a grail was. I learned the word “Foamposite.” I learned that Iverson had tattoos and braids and that he was short. I learned the silhouette of his crossover. I did not yet know anything about basketball.

From there everything followed. I started playing and watching. I learned the teams, the numbers, the box scores. I got into rap, American movies, and English. At first I wanted to understand the shoes and the players; then I wanted to know more about the place they came from. After school my classmates and I would walk home past the concrete courts. One afternoon I told them that when I grew up I would go to America and see an NBA game in person. Nobody laughed. It was just a thing you said at thirteen.

The Galaxies came much later. By then I was online, deep in sneaker forums: release calendars, resale threads, arguments over whether a colorway was fire or trash. I had traded the magazines for forum posts, and now there was a pair called the Galaxy Foamposite to want.

Years later I walk past the box. When my mother bought me those magazines, the life in them still seemed far away.

I arrived. I live in New York, I’ve been to NBA games, and I bought the shoes. By the time I bought them, the price had fallen below retail. The hype had moved on. I bought them anyway. I wore them to the kitchen and back. They are not comfortable. I put them back in the box.

The boy at the train station was rich in distance: so much was still ahead of him, available to imagine. Every arrival since has made some of that imagined life real, and left a little less of it for me to imagine.

I used to think the answer was to stop consuming and start creating. I am less sure now. Much of what I have made draws on things I first read or saw. Writing this, I can feel how closely wanting and making remain connected.

I wanted the shoes, but I also wanted the life I imagined around them. At least, that is how I understand it now. The objects gave me something I could point to before I knew how to describe the rest.

The box is still on the shelf. I don’t know when I’ll open it again.

Writing