There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

And still, there is material impact to these declarations, that a place is unfit for anyone to enter. That it is so violent that it might as well be left to collapse on itself. It doesn’t matter what magic exists inside the borders of a place neglected by those in power. They wouldn’t be able to recognize it even if they could walk through the hood without fear, which they couldn’t. It’s all part of a larger mission. 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.

Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower that we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not. Both landlords and tenants within our own sadness, and sometimes it just happens. Grows while you sleep. Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.

Who is to say what good behavior is when the reward for it is being a little more free? If I will play the game and submit myself to a nefarious binary, I will say that I have been good. I have never been innocent, but I have tried to be good. Even when I robbed, I was good. It is good to survive, after all, if one is to be sentenced to living.

But where I have struggled mightily is in the feeling that comes with knowing someone I loved once and maybe still love is enjoying a life with someone else. And yet! Even struggling with this and knowing very clearly that I do not wish to be the shepherd, dragging myself to my own devastation, I still! Like you, probably! (I say “probably” because while loneliness is not at all a crime, I do not wish to be alone here!) I have indeed reached for my phone! On a night when no one else will return my texts, on a night where my dull and understated flirtations have gone underappreciated and without reciprocation! And yes, I have opened Instagram and made my way to the page of a person I miss. I do this, in part, with the hope that they are missing me, wherever they are. That they have littered their Instagram stories with sad songs and dull photos of the sky. Meals for one. Walks through the doldrums of winter, leaving behind only one set of footprints.

I swear to you, I would never take to the streets looking to watch something burn if my heart were not broken.

Yes, the real gift heartbreak leaves behind is the gift of the most delicious delusions. Let the mind run wild with what could be, even if it cannot actually be. Someone I love is gone, and I cannot get them back. And after I have convinced myself that I don’t want them back due to their surely evil ways, what is there left to hope for except the previously untouchable miracles that I have surely earned through my suffering? I don’t believe in reparations for my own sadness—until I do. The world certainly does not owe me any rewards in the aftermath of all it has put me through, assuming there is an aftermath beyond the swampy flood of suffering.