There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Taken in at twenty-five miles per hour. Someone in the passenger if you’re lucky. Someone who learns you through every past you’ve survived. The long way home is still a way home. I am a devotee of these politics, overly romantic as they might be. And of course I’m not immune to the desire for exits.

What it comes down to is that some of us would rather live a long life of what some might consider failure, but do it in a place that will catch you, every time.

Yes, bring your hauntings down to the fire and throw them in. Bring not just the trinkets and tokens of dismantled love but bring your broken hearts, the whole damn faulty machine. There are enough new ones to go around.

The flame is political, of course, but it is sometimes mundane, sometimes romantic, sometimes simply a necessity, and not all necessities are political but some certainly are mundane and a few damn sure are something close to romantic. And speaking of burning for a brief, candescent moment before there is nothing left to be felt, this, too, is longing.

& it is harder to sell this on the evening news but the fire is a baptism, the fire says Get gone & we can start clean & so then what isn’t your own can become your own if it is all some vast & empty burned-down nothing at the end of a long night

Tell me you haven’t invented a reason to transform the beloved into the wretched, at least one time, to yourself, in the quiet of a dark room, when the weight of loneliness demanded you find a target, at least for now, at the start of it all.

if we are to deal, strictly, in the myths and delusions that propel us from one heartbreak to the next, I need to imagine that somewhere, I am still not good enough for someone, for something. And the remedy—comically temporary as it may be—is to drag a loud and alarmingly bright choir into the streets to sing of whatever minor pleasures I’ve received on the other side of my pain.

What I mean when I say that a villain stays a villain is that our damage remains even after we’ve been punished for it, and there is very little control any of us have over our own absolution.

Yes, the permanence of leaving is hard to reckon with, but I suppose I love the dead, in part, because they are no longer here to ask anything of me. To be dissatisfied with who I’ve become. There’s a mercy in that, though I would take at least some of my beloveds back across the threshold of living if I could.

I am sorry, I was selfish once. I wanted to feel nothing if I couldn’t feel the world alongside your living selves. I am no longer cursing your names into pillows.

And so, it was never the leaving. I was born into an obsession with returns. Something or someone leaves you, but you’ll get something or someone back. Sometimes it’s an even exchange.

It is the Great White Hope syndrome, baked so firmly into the DNA of American culture that there are people unaware of when they’re bowing to it.

Niceness, too, is a hustle, though I will have to approach that another time, when there aren’t tanks lining the downtown of the city I live in, awaiting armed fascists who might seek to break into the statehouse or who might seek to yell on a sidewalk, or who might seek something in between those two extremes.

As if a moment is not within a braid of moments that defines a place. As if a place is not defined, at least in part, by how eagerly and comfortably it retreats to violence as a type of language.

I am not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means that at the right hour, I am everyone’s fool.

There is confetti falling down in your honor, somewhere. Someone is running their fingers through their own hair and marveling at the incandescence tumbling downward from atop their own head.

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.

But if you have fallen, an effervescent victim, into a state of dreaming, then let us begin there.

We know better but are willing to be fooled for what the act of being fooled can add to the experience.

Most of the beauty I have surrendered myself to is tucking some far less delicious honesty beneath its magic, and so why not this?

Do not tamper with the engine of the heart, rusted as it is but still running. It knows what it knows, it hums well enough to have carried you to this morning, and with luck, it might carry you to another one.

I would like to consider the ways we all march to our sometimes-boring deaths without understanding what it is to be so devoted to someone or something that you might be compelled to speed up that march so that they can continue their own. I am not here to consider what is good or what is bad but simply to consider what is sometimes necessary, even if I don’t have the heart for it.

Yeah, we could take this motherfucker apart brick by brick, but then we’d have more bricks than hands willing to rebuild anything, and ain’t that the way of it. We don’t know what we’d do with ourselves if we won here.

It is romantic to be cursed, to feel like the world has it out for just you. That there is a deity bored enough to disrupt your ecstasy.

it when Cudi said he sees ghosts not all haunting is of an evil sort sometimes it’s love sometimes the people who never wanted to leave find a way to stay

the sound of dirt being placed upon a child’s grave travels faster than the bullet but cannot stop it

And with this, I ask you now: Who among us has conflated the myth of innocence with the reality of goodness? With who does or doesn’t deserve to live?

The greatest lies are told in the name of what people believe they can reach out and touch. How the idea of winning in a place where no one believes you to be a winner can summon the heart to leap from the edge of a cliff, praying to land in a sea of outstretched hands.

The axis upon which success and pleasure tilts is flimsy, and some days I would have rather failed but been in awe of the rapturous joy I got to fold into with my crew, boys who were not yet big enough or good enough to play on a court where the games mattered, and so we made our own game, 0:42 one where we could be small and inconsequential gods, architects of the miraculous.

What I have been asking, the door I have been pawing at this entire time, is for a reimagining of eternity. A reversal, perhaps. Not that our happiest, freest selves are fastened to a dream, while we exit and return to the living world. But that our exit is where the dreaming begins, and our real, actual living is the place where we remain at our most joyous, time moving forward by small inches, each of us growing only seconds older with each passing year.

We might still be alive back there, on the beautiful and bowing branch of youth. No one has been buried. No one has learned to load a gun. No one knows the price of anything that might sell good in any season.