Swallowing a Basketball

I tried to push a basketball down my throat yesterday.

With both hands gripping it tightly, as though it was a melon and I was testing its ripeness, I cupped my lips around its dimpled curve.

Leather on lips.

Grit lodged between my front teeth, from what the ball had rolled off the black top drive way where my father and I had played game after game of horse, 21, around the world. Green chalk lines graffiti the drive way: squares, numbers, and lines until the rain wash them and our game away. (If I won, it was because he’d let me.)

I pushed the basketball in farther, my tongue helping it along. Wet, wetter yet, I can never choke it down—too big, too much.

Then I realized as my lungs, a life all its own, asked me to stop as it ate less and less air. It was not a basketball I was trying to swallow but my life, a part I wanted to forget. But, I will never forget because memories cannot be eaten only tasted again and again like eating that first slice of hot apple pie or lump of coal, both bitter in their own way.