There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

the question is always about how a people could do this to their own place & there are many answers & most of them are about how none of this shit is ours & you have mistaken being in a place for having control over it, a mistake I’ve made before but certainly did not make with a brick in my hand & a bandana over my face & 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 & I know this isn’t generous to the shop owners & the elders who have lived on a block for decades & wanted to die on a block that was at least close to how they remembered it, but what can I do to convince you that fire is not the villain & the person who lights a match isn’t a villain & the people cheering while a building burns aren’t the villains & there are villains, surely, but they aren’t here, not among a people seeking deliverance & the villain is an invention, our enemies, the ones I promised we’d leave behind, those are inventions, but they are inventions born out of a heart’s 6:00 breaking.