There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Let us consider, again, what it means to have a place as reprieve, a people as reprieve, somewhere the survival comes easy. Should there not be a language for that? A signifier not only for who is to be let in but also who absolutely gotta stay the fuck out?

I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloveds. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don’t have the heart to cross it.

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.

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.

If you are someone who is from a place not everyone made it out of, or if you have been to enough funerals where parents or grandparents weep over the caskets of their babies and grandbabies, if you know forever is a hand dealt by an uncertain dealer, you may wear the signs of your aging like thick, heavy gold, weighing the body down, but still stunning—unavoidable in its shine.

Yes, there are moments I have spent and will continue to spend in a mirror, massaging products onto my skin and slowly washing them off, if not to delay the very things I am now welcoming, at least to make them as luminous as possible. Do not be fooled by the weapons I refuse to lay down. I come to you today with gratitude in knowing the fight cannot be won.

Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

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.

I asked him if he was ever afraid & he looked somewhere above my head somewhere beyond even the ceiling & he said I’ve never been more afraid than I have been curious

Luck isn’t always about what wins and sometimes is about what you can keep close. What doesn’t get you glory but what has also never done you wrong.

I swear to you, I would never take to the streets looking to watch something burn if my heart were not broken. If, through its breaking, I did not need to invent an enemy. Nameless and faceless as a brick building or a glass window.

I say “night” and you will know that I mean the time that is morning, by definition, but still feels like night to those who haven’t slept, who twirl between the veil of days as it grows thinner, blows gently to the side to reveal one light’s surrendering to another’s. Those of us who crawl in those hours searching to prolong a miracle. I have seen some of you there, I am sure of it.

I knew this walking through downtown Cleveland, passing a bit of coin to the unhoused man underneath a building’s awning who nodded toward Quicken Loans Arena and mumbled Ain’t this some shit? and I didn’t know what the “this” was, but I still nodded, and said Yeah, you right because whatever it was, I knew he was right.

A place that holds, within it, a container of our memories. Even if they aren’t the good memories. A city is a vessel. A mirror for our past selves. And so it gets away with its lying, sometimes. I lie to myself about the places I love, even when I don’t want to. Even when the places I love don’t look like the places I love anymore. You look into the mirror and the mirror laughs, asks what good the reflection is if everything has turned to dust. And still, I forgive, and forgive, and forgive. I call this loyalty because I have to.

I don’t know how to explain this to anyone who hasn’t spent a large portion of their life betting on losing teams, betting on a city people foolishly consider to be a losing city. I cannot explain this to anyone who hasn’t stumbled their way into some undeniable beauty only to set it on fire at their arrival because they felt too close to that which they weren’t sure they deserved. I cannot explain this to anyone who hasn’t prayed in a church for something they weren’t entirely sure God gave a fuck about. The trivial, selfish pearls of survival, the things that don’t entirely help anyone else but might drag someone from one moment of living to the next.

But that’s the thing: you aren’t supposed to look behind you if what’s in front of you is already good. Even if you think, for a moment, that some part of whatever is behind you might be better.

I say I was happier in the past because the pain of the past is a relic. I speak of it but no longer feel it. I do not know what pain is coming, but I know it is coming.

But I remember what was left 5:19 of the blood and I remember the light from a candle hovering over it as the sun began to set and I remember staring down at my shoes and I remember feeling like the concrete was opening up and I know this to be nothing but rage I know this to be what comes after swinging wild punches at the air and imagining the faces of your worst demons the cops the politicians who call the places you love war zones the helicopters that won’t let you sleep that claw through the walls and wake up elders and children and goddamn I remember at my feet that blood-stained concrete just split right in half and opened up and I want a whole city underground if it does not love my people I want to bury the new condo developments instead of my people I want to bury the craft breweries and the barcades and the mixed-use helltowers instead of my people I want the statues melted down I want the mothers of murdered children to do it I want the heat to rise from a statue’s vanishing and last for ten summers I don’t want apologies anymore no not this time I want the mayor to walk through a place he called a war zone at night I want people to get real honest with themselves about what war actually is I want the schools to have heat I want the schools to have air I want the riot gear thrown in the river the river that was blue when I was a boy but now leaves brown streaks as it runs away from the city I want the brown river to carry the riot gear to some other hell and I ...