We played this morning.
Four games. Nothing dramatic about it. No final rally. No foreshadowing. Just the usual grunts, complaints, arguments over line calls, and Jay checking the shuttlecock the way he always did – tossing it up once before the first serve. No one else was allowed to touch it after that first toss. It was his ritual. Untouchable. Non-negotiable.
Ten minutes after he went home, he was gone.
That sentence still doesn’t sit right in my head.
Jay and I played together for almost five years. Badminton partners by arrangement, temperament, and stubborn compatibility. Jay was a peculiar character. He was particular about the game. Particular about winning. Particular about how the game should be played.
Very few people partnered with him for long.
I did. Mostly by accident, partly by strategy.
Jay hated mistakes. Especially other people’s mistakes. With most partners, that came out as anger. With me, it didn’t, because I discovered early on that the best way to manage Jay’s temper was reverse psychology. Whenever I messed up, I’d shout at myself before he could. Loud. Overdramatic. Public.
And something strange would happen.
Jay would calm me down.
“Relax,” he’d say. “It’s okay. One point and we are on.”
I don’t know when that dynamic flipped, but it stuck. We figured each other out, the way doubles partners sometimes do not by becoming similar, but by learning where to stand when the other person lunges too far.
Jay was obsessed with winning. Not metaphorically. Literally. Even on days when his body clearly wasn’t cooperating, he’d push for one last win before going home. Just one. As if leaving on a loss was unacceptable to the universe.
He dyed his hair pitch black. Religiously. I made fun of it, of course. I called him Black-headed Jay, after the bird. He pretended to hate the nickname, which meant he secretly liked it.
We were six of us. Three teams. A closed ecosystem. Tight for years. We didn’t let people in easily. You had to be good to earn your way into that circle not just skilled, but committed. Morning after morning. Same court. Same faces. Same unspoken rules.
Now one of those faces is missing.
And suddenly, I’m not just grieving a person, I’m grieving a rhythm.
I’ve been here before. In 2016, I lost my biking partner in an accident. I stopped biking after that. Not out of principle. Not out of drama. It just… ended. The joy didn’t survive the absence.
I don’t know if badminton will go the same way.
Right now, I don’t know if I even want to pick up a racket again. I don’t know if I’ll ever find another partner who makes sense in the same strange, functional way. I don’t know if some games are meant to end without a replacement.
What I do know is this:
Jay showed up. Every morning. With his rituals, his temper, his obsession with winning, his black-dyed hair, and his insistence that the game be taken seriously, because he took it seriously.
This morning, we played four games. All 6 of us after a very very long time. Like it was meant to be.
If that matters to anyone, it would have mattered to him.
And for now, that’s enough.
