There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

You will surely forgive me if I promised we would talk about our enemies when what I meant was that I want to begin this brief time we have together by talking about love, and you will surely forgive me if an enemy stumbles their way into the architecture of affection from time to time.

To have a secret that is just ours, played out through some quiet and invented choreography. A touch between us that lingers just long enough to know we’ve put some work into our love for each other.

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.

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?

This is a self-indulgent way to imagine the life after this life, but I have massaged all other meaning I can out of the sky, out of the shapes of clouds and the oranges and reds that fight their way through those clouds while the sun laughs its way to surrender.

And yes, laughter and crying both tumble out of the body’s orchestra at a similar tune, and so who is to say, really, when one became the other, or if they were ever disparate devices of pleasure at all on that afternoon, the rain percussive against the windows, keeping time with our reckless unfurling. The two of us, laughing and crying ourselves to sleep, wondering if there would ever be a time when we might find ourselves unleashed from the kingdom of vanity.

I believe that I was a child once because I am afraid today. There are parts of me that might die soon, parts of my memory that might drift to a distance too far for me to get back, and because I know myself to be afraid of this, that is all I need to believe that I was once a child.

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.

Absence, maybe, but absence requires an understanding of what should be. What was once. It has always been impermanence, beloveds.

A promise is a foolish thing to make, but here is one, again: We will leave our enemies behind here and never turn to face them again. But this is not a story about heroes, either. Not everyone will die. No one will live forever.

It was a salve in a sometimes vicious place, to have a respected adult, a pillar of greatness, look at you and remember your face enough to want to say hi, to ask if you were staying out of trouble. To, in so many words, say I will not let you move through this city and be forgotten.

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.

Call it war, call it whatever you want. You wouldn’t know what to do with your face turned toward the blaring dawn, having survived another handful of hours that someone didn’t want you to. There is no language I can find for the affection of repeated survival. To know you haven’t been caught just yet. That with some luck, you never will be.

I have sat at the feet of poets who told me that there is power in withholding. In not offering the parts of yourself that people are most eager to see.

again while I walk to the security line before getting on a plane, before forcing myself to forget about the mechanics of flight & all the ways it could fail & I think about Lonnie in the sky, kept safe by his people & the small but useful things that outlasted their dreams

John Glenn took my small hand in both of his hands & 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

what is real and not real is sometimes simply a matter of who is witnessing the miracle and who can be tricked into a suspension of disbelief at the altar of light.

I love the stunt, for how it opens the gates to dreaming, and I love anything that pushes against the door of reality and offers an elsewhere. I don’t need the elsewhere to be better, I just need it to be somewhere else.

I wish all failure could be as beautiful as the failures that arrive to us midair, a reality setting in that we are incapable and yet still in flight.

I love the homecoming because I have known what it is to leave. I have seen the city I love from the sky just as I have seen the city I love from the cracks in between metal bars. Cherish the homecoming, because you know what lasts forever and what does not.

The witnesses may be rare, but the storytellers exist in abundance, and I would say it ain’t a competition but it damn sure is,

We’ve built all the myths already, and we’ve seen someone breeze past them and then vanish. What else is there to do but walk away while the scent of magic still hangs over you, at least for a little bit longer?

Pick a decade and I got names you’ve never heard of, I’ve got stories you wouldn’t believe. I can tell you about guys who didn’t hoop to get away from the streets, or to get out of anywhere. Guys who hooped because they wanted to be respected on the streets they loved. They wanted to make themselves infamous in the place that held them, and that, too, is a type of making it. People just looking for a place to feel invincible, for a few hours, in a city that might otherwise swallow them whole.

And besides, it might do all of us some good to reconsider what making it even means, or at least to honor a world where making it is not defined by the glamorous exit, not only by television cameras, not only by coming back with a pair of trophies riding shotgun.

A child is born unto a desperate place, and the child becomes a king, and the desperate place can keep him, can protect him, can offer him a modest kingdom. But even a modest kingdom is still a kingdom. If things have gone wrong enough for a long enough time, anyone can become a god.

What good is a witness in a country obsessed with forgetting? But I’m talking about history now and history ain’t nothing but a whole bunch of shit a lot of witnesses don’t wanna speak on.

With enough ferocity, we are told that a prayer ends in mercy. Our wishes might not render us so lucky.

“Miracle” is another word for deception. Who or what can make someone believe anything that would be otherwise unbelievable.

the sun is a bareknuckle brawler that can only be held back by the clouds for so long before it needs to get a taste of whatever your skin can offer up as evidence of suffering or even discomfort will do in the collection plate of unbearable seasons

& I am not saying Terrance wasn’t merciful I am saying mercy has its limits & its limits are a mother you promised you’d keep coming home to & a child who you don’t have to stare at long before being reminded of your own face weary & aging as it may be & so I get it & yet I still cursed that fool as he lingered over the soda machine on the days I wanted something sweet to drown myself in

& there it was you could see it you could see what whispered beneath the shouts & curses & it was desire again making a cameo at the exit of rage it is desire that arrives for the curtain call when our tantrums have exhausted themselves

& so I ask my pal in all his gold if it is also revival to keep the living alive a little longer & if it is also resurrection if both geography & savior are granted a new life & my pal shakes his head & says no no, you got it all wrong—no one should place their heart in the hands of a human in hopes for salvation & ok ok fine I say but then what do we make of kings

Let some of my own beloved elders tell it, and prayer is the only cloak that can never be torn from the shoulders of anyone it is placed upon. And so, made from the lips of a person who loves us, we’re all one good prayer from being royals, or something close.

If there is anything worth killing for, it is probably whatever might unlock a chain from around someone else’s neck.

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.

What to make of the people, anywhere, who can no longer tell the difference in sound between a door opening and a door closing and only know there is no place for them on the other side?

Forgive me for committing to suffering. I thought it might be the answer. That if I suffered loudly enough, for long enough, I would be owed something from somewhere holy.

the front of it tilting back, a mouth drinking in the sun’s final offerings, brightness collapsing atop another, more alarming brightness.

I would like to be granted an audience with the architect of longing. It isn’t my first time casting this wish out into the distance, but I would like for the wish to be taken seriously this time around by whoever is in charge of such things.

I don’t believe the architect to be any kind of God, though I would be open to being proven wrong. I imagine, most likely, that we are dealing with one of God’s lesser angels. One of the bored and mischievous ones, with too much time on their hands, who disrupted an otherwise reasonably stable emotional cocktail with their own whimsy.

If this meeting were ever to occur, I would most like to discuss the nuances of heartbreak. Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary ...

But longing is the engine, dropped in and speeding me to all of my most pointless ponderings.

I never thought of my father as longing for a return to anywhere, which is, of course, what a child believes. Even while sitting beside a man who has made a ritual of silence. A man who made a ritual of looking up and watching planes take people from the place he was to any place he wasn’t.

Call me a fool and call me a cynic, but I love Otis because he approaches romance in the only way that makes sense to me: love as a feather that just hasn’t found the wind to carry it away yet.

Apologizing is for the humbled; begging works best if the humility has yet to set in. This is, often, what makes begging such a unique vessel for this brand of song and—I must admit—why it makes sense that men have the most prominent hold on the genre.

An obsession with suffering on the path to triumph is not uniquely American but does manifest itself in uniquely American ways. It’s the lie we’re told about what success truly “counts” and what doesn’t. This, too, prioritizes a type of staying.

I find very little shame in the absurdity of the pathetic when it’s all a person feels like they have in their toolbox to keep close what they imagine is better than absence.