There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.

If we don’t talk about what we do beyond the frantic moments of what we do, then we can convince ourselves that there is a newness to each clumsy encounter. That we’re mostly strangers, drifting toward each other, desiring only touch and nothing else. And in the hour that is our hour, a window opens and we can breathe out all the sad stuff. Find a closet for our tapestry of aches. Both of our mothers had died, which might bond us in another world, if we were considering falling in love and not simply pouring ourselves into what would otherwise be vast, lonely gaps of living.

Fear is one thing that can carry an unassuming heart to the gates of love, or at least gates that might be in the same neighborhood as the gates of love. 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.

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

I believe that I was a child once because I am afraid today.

Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower that we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not. Both landlords and tenants within our own sadness, and sometimes it just happens. Grows while you sleep. Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.

Mercy, also, is how the imagination survives.

At twenty years old, I didn’t have a steady job or enough money to buy consistent meals, but I could definitely put some cash aside to blow on tickets at the corner store. I can’t explain this except to say that it is seductive, to feel as though your luck might change in an instant, that you don’t have to work your way through or toward anything. Just that one day, the numbers will fall in your favor, and your problems will be held under the raging waters of newfound wealth. And yes, of course, this cycle preys on the poor and on the desperate, but if you’ve ever been poor enough and desperate enough, there is no open mouth you won’t blow a prayer into, hoping that it is blown back out, one day, wherever your darkest hour descends.

Luck isn’t always about what wins and sometimes is about what you can keep close. What doesn’t get you glory but what has also never done you wrong.

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.

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

Mostly, though, it was the time before the simplest, most mundane pleasures could be governed by fear.

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. We can make our small talk and keep it moving. Or depending on the circumstances, one can quietly slip a couple aisles over and remain extremely still, hoping that we weren’t spotted and hoping that our ex-beloved doesn’t require any of the goods in the aisle we’ve stumbled into.

The sun dances from behind the gray, and I want the warmth. The trees are trying to fight back to life, and I root for them. But then, I think, what will become of this misery that I’ve held? That I’ve kept for myself, that I’ve made my own? I know my way around this. I want to keep the familiar as much as I want to run toward whatever newness arrives. I want to wallow in the memory, in the reality of what I know. What can only hurt me as much as I allow it to.

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.

Love is like this, too. What my happily committed pal is saying, I think, is that one must become content with shedding a version of oneself that one might only vaguely remember but not be able to touch again. While my other pal has accelerated this process, shedding so frequently that there is no past self that can even stick around long enough to be remembered. Just a constant scroll of new selves to revel in and then discard.

But then, when the exit is present, when it seems, in fact, like this would be a much easier path than any path to rebuilding, there is another game that begins. The hope that a person you loved or loved once but don’t love in the same way fears loneliness with the same ferocity that you do. And so, sometimes, two unlucky people remain, outrunning a desire to hear their own echoes.

And sometimes people leave because they have to survive. Sometimes people leave because staying has run its course, a course littered with failures. I know what it is to leave in hopes that whatever has failed me isn’t a part of my own internal makeup, that it is a place dragging me down, beckoning me toward all my worst impulses.

What it comes down to is that some of us would rather live a long life of what some might consider failure, but do it in a place that will catch you, every time. I will take that over a triumph in a city that doesn’t touch me back. One that holds my joyful shouts but returns no echo.