Tennis: Deep In The Woods

There’s something unreal about a tennis court cut into the forest. The hard surface sits there like an implant among all that brown and green, the net dividing a rectangle of space that was never meant to exist. You lose the ball constantly in the trees. The silence between points gets heavier each time, and you realize you’ve driven out here not to play well but to play somewhere no one else is around. It’s the same game, the same rules, the same pointless chase, but stripping away the audience strips away whatever I thought I was doing on a court in the city. Out there, there’s nothing to prove and no one to prove it to. Just the ball and the trees and whatever I needed to think about badly enough to make the drive.