Friendship
Three friends met through sunset tennis.
What started as a one-off doubles drop-in became a Tuesday tradition that outlasted three jobs and one move across the city.
Yara Ahmadi
6 min read
The first Tuesday I showed up, I didn't know anyone. I had moved to East Beijing six weeks earlier and was very deliberately Doing Things — gallery openings I didn't enjoy, dinner parties with people who were almost my friends.
Tennis was supposed to be a hobby. It became the load-bearing wall of my week.
We never planned it. Some weeks we played doubles, some weeks we just hit. Once we played in the rain because nobody wanted to be the one to call it. Slowly, without anybody declaring it, the court became the place we showed up — through bad weeks at work, through breakups, through the small daily things that make up a life.
Three years on, two of us moved across town and we still come back. Same court. Same time. Different city around us.
"Tennis was supposed to be a hobby. It became the load-bearing wall of my week."
