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 银河喷 — the Galaxy Foamposite. I want to say I bought them to close a loop. That is too clean. I bought them because of a magazine my mother bought me when I was in primary school, which I need to get to by way of a poster and a jersey that came first.

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 篮球之神 — 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 森林狼, 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 them home and read them flat. 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. I started watching. I learned the teams, the numbers, the box scores. I got into rap, into American movies, into English — at first because I wanted the shoes and the players to make sense, and then because once you start reaching for the language of a place you cannot stop. 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 银河喷 came much later. By then I was online. 虎扑 had a 装备区 — the gear section — where you watched release calendars and resale threads and argued over whether a colorway was fire or trash. The Galaxy Foamposite arrived near the peak of that entire world, a shoe named after the sky itself. I had traded the magazines for forum posts. The reaching did not stop. The surface had just moved online.

Years later I walk past the box. The boy who stood at the train station next to his mother had nothing, which is another way of saying he had everything. He had the entire distance to what was on the cover. The distance was shaped like a shoe, and like a country, and like the version of himself he would become once he arrived.

I arrived. I live in New York. I have been to NBA games. I bought the shoes. The market, when I bought them, had already let the price fall below retail — the coded signal that the shoe was no longer required for anyone to be 最靓的仔. The system had quietly moved on. I bought anyway. I walked them to the kitchen and back. They are not comfortable. I put them back in the box.

The boy at the train station was not poor. He was rich in a currency adults don't have: distance. Every arrival I have managed in the years since has been a slow, honest withdrawal from that account. Each one a little poorer, a little more real, a little less mine.

I used to think the answer was to stop consuming and start creating. I don't anymore. Most of what I've made is a retelling of what I read. Writing this, I can already hear the same circuit running — read, want, have, want again. The room is smaller than it looks.

The boy did not want the shoes. He did not want the jersey or the poster either. He wanted a self he had not yet been forced to become. The objects were the nearest thing his finger could touch. I understand why he reached.

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

欲买桂花同载酒，终不似，少年游。