There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.

So much of the machinery of race- and/or culture-driven fear relies on who is willing to be convinced of what. How easy it is to manufacture weaponry out of someone else’s living if the emphasis is placed on the right or wrong word, or if that word is repeated enough, perhaps in a hushed tone.

The first way I felt myself operating on the other side of America’s fear was being young and idolizing the people America was trying to convince me to be afraid of.

and isn’t it funny the lengths our enemies go to in order to say I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me?

Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.

It is a strange miracle to be able to trace your own aging, your own mortality through someone who is living alongside you, someone who has survived eras at the same time as you have, in some of the same places.

I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved.

The heart doesn’t break all at once. It would be easier that way, cleaner. The process of breaking begins somewhere many of us can’t even recall. It accelerates in bursts throughout a life; sometimes it hums along at its steady pace. But with the accumulation of enough pain and the promise of more to come, we can only carry ourselves so far. The joyous weight of trophies and medals is nothing when compared to what the heart must endure, how it shields us from what it can, for a little while, before falling to its knees.

era of ’90s hip-hop that was defined, in part, by young black men attempting to retranslate the idea that had been pushed upon them that they were all living in war zones, destined to be casualties, that it was either death or prison. It wasn’t so much subversion, I think. It was an acceptance, forced through a lens of glamour and sold back to record labels, to fashion brands, to vehicle companies.

The space between what you can get and what people think you deserve to have is sometimes a crack, but sometimes a canyon. It depends on where you’re from or what you look like. It can depend on what your parents do for a living or if your parents are still living at all.

Home isn’t a choice one makes; home is a set of circumstances. A draft lottery, too, relies on a set of circumstances, propelled by luck.