There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I believe no gold to be subtle. I believe nothing to be subtle when it can be snatched from a neck in order to feed a family.

I never asked about the wigs, and I never asked about the cancer. I never asked about the old coat of her mother’s that never seemed to leave the coat rack by the front door. I knew what it was like to keep something close, just in case there was some error in the universe. The people we love deserve to return to the places they left with the things they love intact.

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.

The thing about the “come back to me before you’ve even ever left” song is that it is only barely about the song itself and more about the catharsis of the song’s narrator, who knows they have done wrong and is preempting whatever might be said about them around a table they are no longer present at.