Sure, my serve needed a ton of work, and okay, my forehands frequently sailed into the next court, but I wasn’t actually that bad. It wasn’t like I was destined for Wimbledon or anything like that, but I could hit a good shot. Like with anything, I would have had to practice if I wanted to get better. But it felt really good to be able to hit a good shot—full-body good, like everything was aligned, everything was attuned. The swing of the racket, the pop of the ball against the strings. The sound of the tennis court: the rounded pop-pop-pop, the silence, the squeaking shoes. I loved it so much. More than I loved the sound itself, I loved the sense that you were the one creating that sound. The sound couldn’t happen without you.

Still—I quit. According to my father, my problem was mental.

Again, he’s not wrong. But it might be more accurate to say that tennis made me really, really angry.

It was one thing when it was going well. Yeah, yeah, the sound of the court, inhabiting your body, being in tune with the universe—how fucking magical. But most of the time? Most of the time tennis was a fucking drag. Most of the time, tennis made me want to kill someone.

Shots skewed left. Shots skewed right. Shots went straight into the net even when I knew exactly how to hit them. Serves went out. Double fault. Serves went into the net. Double fault again. Lose, lose, lose, even though you knew exactly how to hit the ball, and even though you were playing someone worse than you, someone named Camille in a visor who just kept hitting these stupid fucking dinky shots—no quality to them or beauty in them at all, just relentless, obnoxious, dink, dink, dink, these pathetic little shots over the net. Camille won. I lost. I threw my racket and got a talking-to from the coach.

“Just don’t get so angry,” Ros had said with a shrug, like emotions were something totally within my control, and theirs. Like one day they wouldn’t pour acid on someone’s baseball cap. Like one day they wouldn’t fall in love with someone because they threw a perfect punch. “Try deep breathing,” my mom had said, like she didn’t yell fuckhead at someone who didn’t use their blinker.

Since getting less angry didn’t seem like a reasonable option to me, I did the next best thing: I quit tennis. No tennis, no anger. Problem solved.

I learned two things on the porch that night.