There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

to talk about our enemies is also to talk about our beloveds. To take a windowless room and paint a single window, through which the width and breadth of affection can be observed.

we have together by talking about love,

WHY ARE ALL MY BOOMS ABOUT LOVE RECCENTLY IM NOT COMPLAONING BUT CRAZZZYYY

what music is echoing in the background and upon which street the music rattles windows.

me and my boys

To have a secret that is just ours, played out through some quiet and invented choreography. A touch between us that lingers just long enough to know we’ve put some work into our love for each other.

Why i love to dap people up man; why gabby and i nevee forgot our handshake

Of the many possible ways to do close readings of pleasure, among my favorite is being a witness to people I love taking great care with rituals some might consider to be quotidian.

This is how I knew my father was somewhere beyond.

something closer to the ground those hands might be reaching up from.

but I am working on generosity toward our enemies, if it might get me closer to any heaven my beloveds are furnishing.

It was miraculous, a gift for the imagination. It beckoned us to see without actually seeing.

To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.

Agree

but I do adore the way it looks on the page, so I will preach it while I still have you.

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?

Athletes had been bald before Jordan, but his baldness was a signature, in part because he had the perfect head to pull off such a show of nakedness. Aerodynamic, some might say.

The hour you’ve dreamed of living again ever since the final grains of it kissed the mountain of sand at the bottom of the hourglass.

To ascend and then return, knowing the world has been altered before I landed.

This is a self-indulgent way to imagine the life after this life, but I have massaged all other meaning I can out of the sky, out of the shapes of clouds and the oranges and reds that fight their way through those clouds while the sun laughs its way to surrender.

My god, how I miss you all. My god, how I pray to be buried in whatever decoration will allow me to arrive to your arms, new again. Clean.

During most of these attempts, one of my brothers would come, frustrated, to get me in order again. Repairing the damage.

Siblings brah

sometimes mistake the desire to not be lonely for love.

Bell hooks man what is love if not th true nurturing of spiritual growth

Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love,

Convenience of friends in school

That’s the miracle of hair. It allows us our mistakes and still returns to us, potentially ready to endure more.

The people we love deserve to return to the places they left with the things they love intact.

Your ball is your ball,

I am sorry for what has been passed down to me without my knowing, what has just shown up on the doorstep and found its way in.

will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

On the basketball courts, alone, there was nothing to contain the shattering echo of the ball’s dance with the concrete. I love a sport where even when I am alone, I am not alone. And I am a little bit ashamed to say that I also love basketball for the violence of its sounds. The way a ball sounds when it ricochets off of a metal hoop that has been worn down by the seasons. The way that a ball, when it rips through a net, might sound the way a thin leather belt sounds being lashed across a child’s bare skin by a parent who might sometimes have been one of our enemies, but only sometimes.

I don’t trust people who don’t love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead. The living who throw an item the dead once cherished toward heaven, wrap it around the highest wire. So high that it looks like the shoes are swinging from the sky itself. Like two legs are hanging down from the edge of a cloud.

I propose that above all, you are a reflection of who loves you.

Hushed prayers climbing atop other hushed prayers, some mouths moving but no sound coming out, fitted caps removed and resting inside clasped hands, cats who I knew hadn’t been back inside a church since they emerged, screaming, from the waters of baptism nervously reaching back toward God.

There is no corner of this jagged city that can take us all.

How they, too, perhaps attempted to fashion some beauty out of the hand they were dealt.

With no struggle for the comfortable viewer to revel in, there’s no pity to balance out the envy.

To people who weren’t from Ohio, it all seemed too good to be true. That he was here and not anywhere else. That he didn’t start sprinting down the court on a fast break and then keep running.

The people who will show up to praise your return, simply because it is a return.

I love all manner of homecoming, all manner of coming home. I love whatever will send a people into the streets, or whatever will get someone to fire up a grill, even if they don’t really know what to do after the fire arrives except stand over it, poke at something with a fork and throw their head back, laughing into the breeze when someone calls them on their inability to get the food moving from the heat to the plate. I love whatever can feel like a good memory, even as it is already unfolding. Yes, for once, your face is in the paper. The good section. The section where no one is dead or divorced. Your name in bold letters, not in the obituaries, not in a crime bulletin. We can cut this one out and put it in a frame. Hang it, lopsided, next to the black Jesus, the gaudy cross. When you cross back into the neighborhood, driving slow with your windows down, the kids will follow you. Running after the red glow of your taillights, all of them holding the paper, pointing at your face, as if it is their own.

love all manner of homecoming, all manner of coming home. I love whatever will send a people into the streets, or whatever will get someone to fire up a grill, even if they don’t really know what to do after the fire arrives except stand over it, poke at something with a fork and throw their head back, laughing into the breeze when someone calls them on their inability to get the food moving from the heat to the plate. I love whatever can feel like a good memory, even as it is already unfolding. Yes, for once, your face is in the paper. The good section. The section where no one is dead or divorced. Your name in bold letters, not in the obituaries, not in a crime bulletin. We can cut this one out and put it in a frame. Hang it, lopsided, next to the black Jesus, the gaudy cross. When you cross back into the neighborhood, driving slow with your windows down, the kids will follow you. Running after the red glow of your taillights, all of them holding the paper, pointing at your face, as if it is their own.