There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

another language for loneliness, having to carry a version of myself that is at least a little bit more empty than the version before it.

Something that has been denied until it is undeniable, like a slightly out-of-focus photo colliding with a bath of irresistible sunlight, which says What you have imagined seeing has always been real.

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 was a salve in a sometimes vicious place, to have a respected adult, a pillar of greatness, look at you and remember your face enough to want to say hi, to ask if you were staying out of trouble. To, in so many words, say I will not let you move through this city and be forgotten.

way, cleaner. The process of breaking begins somewhere many of us can’t even recall. It accelerates in bursts throughout a life;

When you create the conditions of war, you get to name the places it happens.

You get what I mean now about the things people believe you deserve to have. It isn’t just about the car or the shoes or the platinum chain as objects, though it is a little about that, too. It’s about a history of America selling dreams back to its people for so long that they stopped knowing what to do when someone they wanted to keep at arm’s length also got to buy into the fantasy.

love the stunt, for how it opens the gates to dreaming, and I love anything that pushes against the door of reality and offers an elsewhere.

And of all the reasons I love the hood, 5:15 the greatest reason is for how we honor our homecomings.

I can tell you about guys who didn’t hoop to get away from the streets, or to get out of anywhere. Guys who hooped because they wanted to be respected on the streets they loved. They wanted to make themselves infamous in the place that held them, and that, too, is a type of making it.

The song is a little less sad if everyone knows the words, if everyone sings them together, all at once. If everyone tries to squeeze the same refrain through the crack in a door, right before it closes for good.

What do you call it when players who came after you fight back tears at the mere memory of you, at the mere mention of your life now, the path you made. Someone who ages, thank God. Someone who lives beyond their past selves. But someone who is also bronzed, a monument embedded in the emotional infrastructure of a place.

in: don’t you fall in with the wrong crowd. What is rarely said about these people and about these moments in our lives is that sometimes the wrong crowd is simply the crowd that loves you the best. The crowd that sees you the clearest. Their wrongness perhaps not inherent but cultivated through a series of neglects or unresolved pains.

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

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.

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.

sometimes the people who never wanted to leave find a way to stay

But I remember what was left 5:19 of the blood and I remember the light from a candle hovering over it as the sun began to set and I remember staring down at my shoes and I remember feeling like the concrete was opening up and I know this to be nothing but rage I know this to be what comes after swinging wild punches at the air and imagining the faces of your worst demons the cops the politicians who call the places you love war zones the helicopters that won’t let you sleep that claw through the walls and wake up elders and children and goddamn I remember at my feet that blood-stained concrete just split right in half and opened up and I want a whole city underground if it does not love my people I want to bury the new condo developments instead of my people I want to bury the craft breweries and the barcades and the mixed-use helltowers instead of my people I want the statues melted down I want the mothers of murdered children to do it I want the heat to rise from a statue’s vanishing and last for ten summers I don’t want apologies anymore no not this time I want the mayor to walk through a place he called a war zone at night I want people to get real honest with themselves about what war actually is I want the schools to have heat I want the schools to have air I want the riot gear thrown in the river the river that was blue when I was a boy but now leaves brown streaks as it runs away from the city I want the brown river to carry the riot gear to some other hell and I ...