There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

what is real and not real is sometimes simply a matter of who is witnessing the miracle and who can be tricked into a suspension of disbelief at the altar of light.

I don’t remember when I stopped being afraid of my father, and I don’t remember when he became aware that I was no longer afraid of him.

My most hopeless years all blur together, surely as some kind of defense mechanism against memory—if it all feels like a blur, I can convince myself that it was over quickly and I hardly suffered.

This is how you know a city has started to become your city. When it moves alongside you, a dance partner who you can never out-step.

There is a kingdom where you are revered, and there is a kingdom, somewhere else, where you are nothing, useful only as a corpse.

Separate but relentless desires can make two fools out of desperate negotiators.

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

For the way he would stare at the rim after a particularly bad miss, like he was being told a lie from someone he trusted once.

There are places where people make it and places where people make it out of. It seems there are far more of the latter than there are of the former.

When I say that nostalgia is a hustle and we are the hustlers, placing an audience at the mercy of its tools, I mean that we must figure out, together, what we are willing to lie about for the sake of a clean memory.

I am not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means that at the right hour, I am everyone’s fool.

I say I was happier in the past because the pain of the past is a relic. I speak of it but no longer feel it. I do not know what pain is coming, but I know it is coming.

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. Those who deserve to be witness to my long and slow savoring of a moment they didn’t want to come, even if I’m not sure how I got there myself.

Many of us came into the world screaming and then spent our living enduring the world’s shouting back.