There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

But we know our enemies by how foolishly they trample upon what we know as affection. How quickly they find another language for what they cannot translate as love.

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.

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

Shit talking is a right, a gift, a mercy with a lineage all its own.

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 escaped me then, the tenderness of the moment, something far beyond what we’d experienced even in our most heightened pursuits of physical affection.

Fear is one thing that can carry an unassuming heart to the gates of love, or at least gates that might be in the same neighborhood as the gates of love.

There is a reality of loving ball in a place where people don’t have money.

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, 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.

When a city names a place unlivable, it suggests that there is something wrong or damaged about the people who do live there. It suggests that their lives are expendable, down to the homes or apartments they live in. And just like that, the lens turns toward property, toward land. Toward the value of vacancy. Don’t play like you haven’t heard this one before. When you create the conditions of war, you get to name the places it happens.

And then there is the fantasy, not only the way America can sell war but also how eagerly it can sell the aesthetics of war back to people who have been convinced they live in so-called war zones.

The powerful call things “war” because it’s hard to sell the plain horrors of terror, but it is not nearly as hard to sell the materials.

There were those who suggested that the vehicle lost value when the “streets” got ahold of it. When it became the latest canvas for overwhelming modifications. When, in short, black people began driving and designing it to meet their desires.

It isn’t just about the car or the shoes or the platinum chain as objects, though it is a little about that, too. It’s about a history of America selling dreams back to its people for so long that they stopped knowing what to do when someone they wanted to keep at arm’s length also got to buy into the fantasy.

It’s all about what you’re willing to forgive, he tells me. You have to choose what to ignore every now and then, he tells me. Sure, there are things that begin to grate on you, he says. But there is beauty in even that—being so intimately familiar with the nuances of a single person that you are comfortable even with their encyclopedia of small annoyances, even as those annoyances snap at your heels for years, and then a lifetime.

Wouldn’t you rather be a widow than a divorcée?

hustling is easiest when you are in a room people don’t believe you belong in.

The phrase Ball don’t lie is one way of saying You get what you deserve.

Innocence is the key that unlocks the box holding all of the aesthetics within.