The Emotional Physics of Penalties

Unfolding and giving and slaying

Drenched. That’s how I am bended over my kitchen counter watching the penalties between the Netherlands and Morocco.

It is the daily evening flood in Mexico rainy season.

It is the tears pouring straight from my heart and dripping down my face.

It is the heat.

THE SWEAT!

Look, I was not in a good state of mind when this week started, and I will not pretend otherwise. There is a kind of derangement that sets in around the fourth knockout match of a World Cup, a chemical thing, somewhere between the third tequila and the second beer, when the rain outside stops being weather and starts being a character in the broadcast, banging on my window like it wants a better view of the penalty spot.

PHY.SI.CAL.

After all it was not bad that it was so many teams.

So many teams means so many chances for the whole thing to go sideways, gloriously, violently sideways, and I live for sideways.

I do not watch football for triumph.

Triumph is a press release.

I watch for the moment a player’s face folds in on itself in front of two billion people and there is nowhere, nowhere, for him to hide that fold.

The Netherlands and Morocco went to penalties and I lost what remained of my composure, which by that point was held together the fumes of my cigarettes.

The Goal keeper bouncing on his line like a man trying to shake off a swarm of bees only he can see.

The shooter walking up with that face — you know the face — the face of someone approaching a vending machine that has eaten their money before.

Click.

Slam.

PAF. (Like my dad would shot)

Roar.

Silence.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, until somebody’s grandmother in Marrakesh or Amsterdam is screaming at a television that cannot hear her.

Honestly the rain was so loud outside by the fourth kick I lost the thread of which despair belonged to which flag, and isn’t that the whole rotten beauty of it — for four seconds the despair is universal, unbranded, just raw human meat flinching in real time.

THE SWEAT, again, I must repeat it, because it would not stop.

This is not domination anymore, what Japan does. This is theft performed so elegantly the victim applauds. Slaying, this week, looked like quiet hands and a closed mouth. Germany pressed and pressed and got nothing for it but a higher heart rate and a worse evening, and I sat there in my flooded kitchen thinking: good. Good. Let the machine learn something about humility for once, even if it forgets it by Tuesday.

And then Paraguay. God, Paraguay. A small country’s penalty hits different in the gut, don’t argue with me about this, I won’t hear it.

Whole nation behind one man’s right foot, his whole childhood riding shotgun, somebody’s rosary somewhere doing overtime.

He walked up like a man walking into a courtroom he didn’t choose to be in. The ball went where it went — I genuinely could not tell you, the screen had fogged up from my own breath by then, which tells you everything about the state I was in — and the noise that came out of my apartment was not language.

Straight gibberish.

It was just sound, animal sound, the sound every small nation’s penalty deserves from at least one stranger crying in a foreign kitchen.

So here’s where it lands, soaked through, half-feral, three notebooks deep in scrawl I won’t be able to read tomorrow: this week was too much, exactly the right amount of too much. Unfolding and giving and slaying, all of it, all at once, no mercy, no edits.

The rain hasn’t stopped. Neither have I.