The day I played basketball with a stranger

Welcome back to another issue. This week — a day trip to Savannah, a stranger named AJ, and a painting of flowers I couldn’t quite get right.

✦ LIFE — The streak, the stranger, and the terrible flowers

I had one plan for Savannah: a sip and paint class I’d booked for myself, very excitedly, very alone. That was it. Three hours from home, solo day trip, one plan, very adult of me.

I was also on a workout streak at the time. Every single day, no exceptions, the kind of quiet commitment you make to yourself that no one else knows about or tracks. I knew Savannah was going to be a problem. No gym, no routine, just a college town absolutely packed on a weekend and me circling for parking like a lost person, windows down.

I finally found a spot and started walking toward the shops on Main Street to kill time before class. And this is the thing about Savannah that gets me every time — you’re always cutting through parks. The whole city is green. Moss hanging off trees, little squares everywhere you turn, the kind of place that makes you slow down whether you meant to or not. I was just walking, not really thinking about anything, when I passed a park and saw a guy shooting hoops alone.

Something got into me. Not a thought, not a plan. Just — something. I walked up to him and asked if I could join him. Boldly. Embarrassingly boldly. The kind of boldness that only exists in the half second before your brain catches up.

His name was AJ. He never told me his last name and honestly it didn’t matter. We just started playing, and then we started talking, and then we were really talking — basketball, the Kentucky Derby because he was from Kentucky, what Savannah was like, what I was doing there on my own, his life, my life. We yapped and yapped. We laughed at each other’s genuinely terrible shots. We kept score on the good ones. We bet on a match or two. It was so easy, the way conversations with strangers sometimes are — no history, no baggage, just two people in a park on a Saturday afternoon being exactly where they were.

By the time I had to leave I was profusely sweating. Like, concerningly sweating. Which I decided, legally, counted as my workout for the day. Streak intact.

We exchanged numbers before I left. Neither of us ever reached out. I don’t even think I have it anymore. And somehow that felt right — there was something really clean about it. Two strangers, one afternoon, a few bad shots, and then just moving on with our lives. No follow-up, no group chat, no keeping it alive past the moment it was meant to live in. That’s the part of solo travel I can never quite explain to people. These moments happen and they’re whole and real and good, and then they’re just done. And it’s somehow exactly enough.

I went back to my car, cleaned up, grabbed some beers, and headed to the paint class — still a little glowing, very ready, slightly damp.

I walked in and immediately clocked that I was the only one there alone. Couples everywhere. Every single table. And for the first few minutes I just sat with that — the small, specific weirdness of being solo at a thing that wasn’t designed for solo people. I felt it. That little voice asking why are you at a couples thing, what is your life.

But then I looked at my canvas and I thought — I’m here because I used to love this. I used to be so good at art growing up, actually good, not just enthusiastic. And somewhere in the general chaos of becoming an adult and having a life and filling up every hour with something productive, I’d just put the brush down and never picked it back up. I missed it in the way you miss things you didn’t notice you were losing.

So I picked it up.

The prompt was a vase with flowers. I painted water flowers instead. They were not great. They were a little uncertain and a little unpolished and very much mine. I was getting progressively drunk, I was chatting with the instructor, and I was having the absolute time of my life.

I did feel a small ache somewhere in the middle of it — that there was no one sitting next to me to turn to and say look at my terrible flowers. I won’t pretend I didn’t feel that. I wished I had someone to share it with. But it was a small ache, and it passed, and mostly I was just so glad I came. Glad I walked into that park. Glad I asked a stranger to play basketball. Glad I picked up a paintbrush after years of not.

It was a good day. A really, really good day.

✦ GROWTH — Showing up differently

We talk about showing up for ourselves like it’s always a dramatic act — the early alarm, the hard choice, the sacrifice. But most of the time, showing up looks quieter than that. It looks like playing basketball in a park because you didn’t want to break a promise you made to yourself. It looks like picking up a paintbrush even though your hands have forgotten how.

Showing up for yourself doesn’t always look like discipline. Sometimes it looks like impulse. Sometimes it looks like a game you didn’t plan to play, with a stranger you’ll never hear from again, that counts anyway.

The version of you that keeps going — even on days that look nothing like the plan — is the version worth building.