There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

The difference between enjoying food and enjoying a meal. I believe there is a sliver of difference between being naked and being bare; I believe that difference also exists between those who enjoy food and those who enjoy a meal. A meal is the whole universe that food exists within—a universe that deserves its own type of ritual and honoring before getting into the containers of it.

I have been better than I have wanted to be at giving in to the foolishness that allows us to sometimes mistake the desire to not be lonely for love.

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.

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 don’t trust anyone who isn’t from where I’m from, who doesn’t live where I live, to report anything as “suspicious” or “not suspicious,” and yet this is the ecosystem that I’ve known and had to rely on, that people I love are subjected to. Tourists wandering through areas they don’t have any connection to, speculating on people they couldn’t care less about. Life and death, determined by the haphazard tourism of people who believe they are eternally at war with everyone but themselves.