There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

There is no language I can find for the affection of repeated survival.

I don’t learn from my repeated heartbreaks as much as I learn to catalog them, to pull them from their cases and admire them with a type of fascination for a while before locking them away again.