There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.

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?

I had to grow into this kind of optimism. Sometimes a life ruptures, and the wound that opens within your living becomes the new normal, so much that the rupture itself doesn’t matter much anymore. But nothing prepared me for the immediacy of having nowhere to go. Having a place to sleep one night and then not having one the next. Even if you know it’s coming, but have lied to yourself about its arrival.

What you may learn is that there are places you can go where no one will pay attention to you if you don’t cause a fuss. Sink down into a big chair at the library for a few hours, and hold a book on your lap, and if you fall asleep, no one will be bold enough to wake you up. Spend a dollar or two at the McDonald’s and sit with a newspaper you swiped from the top of a trashcan, and that booth can be your booth for a little while. There is a way to blend into the architecture of a place, as long as you don’t summon any chaos while you do it. Walk through a park where the weight of summer has broken the necks of the sunflowers, sent their faces moaning near the soil they burst from, and imagine that even the flowers must try to make a deal with whoever their god is, hoping for a better result than their current predicament.

The truth of the matter is that when you have little to no other options, a city decides some things for you.

It was strangely fulfilling to have a routine, even through what some might consider to be aimless living.

The greatest engine within the machinery of deception is mercy. The mercy visited upon you by those who know something is amiss but don’t say shit.

I came to God once. I made a deal. I said If you give me this, I will give you anything. We both knew I was a liar. I suppose God is under no obligation to be merciful about our deceptions.

It is one thing to take over a game and another to transform time, to rearrange the minds of everyone watching.

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

Until an architect of the miraculous takes over a game, and the deception becomes real. This is really happening. All of the good you believed would arrive, suddenly has. All of the bad that is coming, certainly will.

Even the act of witnessing has its limits, if it is left to its most idle definitions—the act of taking something in and even perhaps spreading the news of what was taken in. What becomes of a witness who is an audience to the unbelievable? In the very literal sense, that which pushes up against one’s capacity for disbelief so intensely that it might, in its pushing, undo the certainty of witness altogether. This is the uncertain and often barren field from which miracle blooms. Yes, I saw what I saw, but I do not believe it and my not believing must mean that there is something greater at work, something I am chasing the language for, even as I watch it shrink on the horizon,

& I started to run they had to know some other shit was up & yeah those boys ain’t smart but they also don’t need much of a reason to chase a nigga & so here we go & I ain’t the fastest but I sure am the most willing to survive in this scenario & there are some things that just don’t show up in the body until we need them to

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.

There are people who say they feel relief when they get caught doing dirt, like they can release the anxieties that were haunting their waking hours, they can stop looking over their shoulders or stop feeling a chill making its way through their extremities whenever a siren’s lights paint over the walls of a dark room.

Then again, as bad as I was at lying to others, I was always at my worst when I was lying to myself.

“Don’t worry, man,” he said, evenly. “Whatever they do to you, they gonna do to all of us.” I thought about this all night, after the sounds quieted and most everyone else outside seemed to be asleep. At first, I thought what he was saying was We all got your back, but the more I thought about it, I think he was actually saying No one in here suffers alone, which is close to the same thing but also decidedly not.

Separate but relentless desires can make two fools out of desperate negotiators.

It doesn’t take long to realize that in a place where no one knows your history, you can be anything. And so we nodded, said something affirmative but slightly dismissive. Performed our awe. Mercy, also, is how the imagination survives.

With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters that a person returns.

There is something about witnessing greatness before the rest of the world fully arrives to it. The witnessing can make you feel like you, too, have access to anything and everything. For a moment, it feels like no horror will ever befall you. And then, without knowing the exact origin point, you descend further from any once-possible promise. You’re a spectator in an always-unfolding coronation. Watching through the fence, because you can’t afford a ticket.