There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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

I do not spend time in the caverns of fear our enemies have built for themselves,

The heart doesn’t break all at once. It would be easier that way, cleaner.

Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.

I’ve made saviors out of the living, because I saw no path to being saved otherwise.

My most hopeless years all blur together, surely as some kind of defense mechanism against memory—if it all feels like a blur, I can convince myself that it was over quickly and I hardly suffered.

What good is a witness in a country obsessed with forgetting?

A king remains a king, no matter how paltry the square footage of their realm.

I know of no good fortune that I haven’t had to chase. The bad fortunes are going to show up whenever they want, whether you invite them or not.

knowing very clearly that I do not wish to be the shepherd, dragging myself to my own devastation,

A heart, sometimes, breaks slowly and without ceremony.

How quickly can we get past the part where we feel everything and cross the other threshold, gasping and numb.

When the heart breaks slowly, gradually, in a way that seems almost inevitable, you can barely even notice it.

When I say that nostalgia is a hustle and we are the hustlers, placing an audience at the mercy of its tools, I mean that we must figure out, together, what we are willing to lie about for the sake of a clean memory.

Life and death, determined by the haphazard tourism of people who believe they are eternally at war with everyone but themselves.

Praise the fantasies that can spring to life while all potential for agony rests.

Tell me if you have ever built a heaven out of nothing, and then tell me what it would take for you to look for a new one somewhere else.

how i feel about new mexico.