There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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

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 li...

I have known elders who tell us young folks to pray only for the important things. Don’t waste God’s time with no nonsense. God is busy, after all. They might point to the sky on a night when the clouds have clocked out, called it a day, and let the moon and all its background dancers take center stage, and some beloved grandmother or grandfather or great-aunt will trace their fingers along some of those stars and say You see that? God has to put each of those in the right place, every night, just for us.

with what can best be described as the supernatural or the divine, something holy enough to trick even the nonbelievers into thinking something good might come their way if they knock loudly enough at the gates, if they kneel humbly enough at the altar, if they face the holy land and close their eyes, if they hear a rustling outside of their window that sounds like someone speaking back, if they convince themselves it isn’t the wind.

ask my pal in all his gold if it is also revival to keep the living alive a little longer & if it is also resurrection if both geography & savior are granted a new life & my pal shakes his head & says no no, you got it all wrong—no one should place their heart in the hands of a human in hopes for salvation & ok ok fine I say but then what do we make of kings

I know of no good fortune that I haven’t had to chase. The bad fortunes are going to show up whenever they want, whether you invite them or not.

“Isn’t it funny how the assassin demands answers while holding a loaded gun inside of your open mouth?”

Forgive me for committing to suffering. I thought it might be the answer. That if I suffered loudly enough, for long enough, I would be owed something from somewhere holy.

Loneliness and heartbreak are not the same. I have been heartbroken and preoccupied with any number of pleasing but ultimately foolish pursuits, just as I have been lonely with a heart at least mostly intact (though it can be said that my heart, and perhaps yours, hums at the frequency of a low and ever-present breaking). But longing is the engine, dropped in and speeding me to all of my most pointless ponderings.

I don’t mind bumping into an ex at the movies or while fumbling through the towels or toiletries at Target. In a small enough city, it happens. And with enough heartbreaks, every city can become a small enough city.

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

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.

shaky proposition, of course. Even shakier when greeted with your old person living a new and joyful life, one that looks unfamiliar to the one you burdened them with, you fool. And yes, a new cast of characters has emerged, none of them you, all of them probably cooler, probably better-looking, most likely laughing at you in this very moment. I am unsure why any of us would pursue this. The anxiety of scrolling through our pasts, lightly, of course, so as not to trigger any dreaded accidental liking of a weeks-old photo (or even months-old, depending on exactly how down bad you might be). It doesn’t make sense to me, even in the rare times I find myself doing it. I believe that what I’m chasing, probably, is a type of certainty. The closure beyond the closure. Preparation for what I might say if I were to ever see my old person or old people out with their new person or new people.

I’ve found it harder, even, when it comes over the platonic relationship (which, when done correctly, is ...

You take what vengeance you can when you are aching from what you believe to be a betrayal that you cannot control any more than you can control the whims of a storm.

Sometimes, people want someone back just for the sake of having them, despite what both parties know and have known about their failures and how, when paired together, those shared failures were insurmountable. No,

If you have ever committed to a marriage that didn’t last, or a years-long romantic endeavor that eventually quieted and died down, you perhaps know this exact feeling. A heart, sometimes, breaks slowly and without ceremony.

It’s all about what you’re willing to forgive, he tells me. You have to choose what to ignore every now and then, he tells me. Sure, there are things that begin to grate on you, he says. But there is beauty in even that—being so intimately familiar with the nuances of a single person that you are comfortable even with their encyclopedia of small annoyances, even as those annoyances snap at your heels for years, and then a lifetime.

is that love itself is not linear, not necessarily defined by the clock or the calendar, as so many have assumed it to be.

The dilemma for me has always been the reality that the early moments of falling for anyone or anything are so seductive, and can rarely be captured again. They can be manufactured, but never fully sung back to life by the same effortless chorus. They appear, and then they drift away.

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’m talking about kicking down the door of some good living while I’m still alive to leap through that bountiful threshold, while I’m still alive to flash the spoils of some good living past the eyes of whoever has caused me a specific type of pain, a pain where low-stakes revenge feels not only appropriate but necessary.

if we are to deal, strictly, in the myths and delusions that propel us from one heartbreak to the next, I need to imagine that somewhere, I am still not good enough for someone, for something. And the remedy—comically temporary as it may be—is to drag a loud and alarmingly bright choir into the streets to sing of whatever minor pleasures I’ve received on the other side of my pain.

there is no gospel richer than the gospel of suffering, of living through large stretches devoid of pleasure for the sake of reaching some place beyond your current circumstances and feeling as though you have truly earned a right to be there.

It was good, for a moment, to watch people, a place, a team, fight to come to terms with that reality and then eventually make peace with it, which is probably easier to do when the stakes are a game and not a life, or a place to sleep, or a person you love walking back through a door they walked out of.

it has always seemed like an inevitable part of living, one that I don’t like to consider myself being at the mercy of. I steal a little bit of control back by knowing that I have none at all over who stays and who goes, or when they stay or go.

When the heart breaks slowly, gradually, in a way that seems almost inevitable, you can barely even notice it. It happens in a small series of whispers, and then one day, there is a corner of it that sighs to pieces while you box up a photo or donate a bag of old clothes.

For all there is to be made about a chorus of pleading, of shouts, of insistent and entitled lovers and ex-lovers fighting amongst each other for a stitch of mercy, some way to rewind and undo the damage of past collisions—that is a privilege of knowing the leaving is not permanent. When it is permanent, the only audience for all that moaning is God, who, despite an alleged track record of miracles, has no interest in the pardoning of grief through resurrection and who, I imagine, grows weary of the unbearable questioning shouted out, piercing the middle of a night. No one likes to imagine God needing rest, but then again, it is impossible to fathom any being required to love that many people who are still living, still teeming with questions and demands.

Yes, the permanence of leaving is hard to reckon with, but I suppose I love the dead, in part, because they are no longer here to ask anything of me.

But I, too, love the dead who decided that the world was simply not tenable for them, or who had that decided for them. Who weighed the cost of suffering with how long they’d be able to survive it, and chose the math that brought them the most peace.

I was born into an obsession with returns. Something or someone leaves you, but you’ll get something or someone back. Sometimes it’s an even exchange. You kiss a person goodbye when they go away for a few days, and they come back to you the same person they were when they left.

I am not the best hustler because I do not know myself as well as I want to, which leads to a series of ongoing self-hustles. Like setting my alarm for 7:30 when I’ve already crossed well beyond the midnight hour, immersed in the glow of my phone. But

People who believe so richly in the inherent goodness of whiteness that they believe empathy alone will grow the hearts of fascists are both hustlers and easily hustled.

In the end of this story, there are tattoos that vanish from the skin of those who got the names of the gone-too-soon inked on them, because no one is gone too soon.

even if much of what we know to be righteous is tinted, slightly, with lies.

slang is borderless. It doesn’t require a ball or a shot or someone with a whistle, enforcing the boundaries of violence. In the streets, the ball still don’t lie,

And so do you then regret the dreaming itself? Or do you return to sleep each night, hoping to get back to that same place, knowing how impossible that might be?

There have been inevitable nighttimes that I have wanted to keep behind a door, a door that I would push my back against, even in the midst of darkness thrashing on the other side, just for another moment or another hour with that flamboyant and dramatic marching band of color blaring against the sky’s canvas.

not tamper with the engine of the heart, rusted as it is but still running. It knows what it knows, it hums well enough to have carried you to this morning, and with luck, it might carry you to another one. If there is a heaven, I suppose there we can weep over the scrapbook of our lives while we wait for the living to climb the constellations. But not now, is what I’m told. Nostalgia is only for the brokenhearted. For the displeased or disaffected, the ones who need to look to the past to give meaning to their present.

Yeah, we could take this motherfucker apart brick by brick, but then we’d have more bricks than hands willing to rebuild anything, and ain’t that the way of it.

How does a person’s blood get washed away from a sidewalk on a block they lived and loved in, on a block where they waved to neighbors, carried groceries home?

and yet this is the ecosystem that I’ve known and had to rely on, that people I love are subjected to. Tourists wandering through areas they don’t have any connection to, speculating on people they couldn’t care less about.

There hasn’t been a city built yet that is incapable of burning down.

Even when I pretend to not care who does or doesn’t believe in me, there is a part of me that will always want to know the people who deserve to be witness to my most raucous celebration.