There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Let us consider, again, what it means to have a place as reprieve, a people as reprieve, somewhere the survival comes easy. Should there not be a language for that? A signifier not only for who is to be let in but also who absolutely gotta stay the fuck out?

I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloveds. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don’t have the heart to cross it.

Of the many possible ways to do close readings of pleasure, among my favorite is being a witness to people I love taking great care with rituals some might consider to be quotidian.

And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.

The first way I felt myself operating on the other side of America’s fear was being young and idolizing the people America was trying to convince me to be afraid of.

Mike was never as cool as he was right then, in the moment directly after his singular defiance of the routines of both flight and flyness.

So many of my childhood impulses relied on the logic of taking to the air and then figuring out a plan on the way down.

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.

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,

I believe that I was a child once because I am afraid today. There are parts of me that might die soon, parts of my memory that might drift to a distance too far for me to get back, and because I know myself to be afraid of this, that is all I need to believe that I was once a child.

I do not say this to submit the aesthetics of childhood—specifically black childhood—to a nefarious algorithm.

Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

The living who throw an item the dead once cherished toward heaven, wrap it around the highest wire. So high that it looks like the shoes are swinging from the sky itself. Like two legs are hanging down from the edge of a cloud.

The team that wasn’t supposed to be in the game at all, who got within a murmur of victory and couldn’t finish the job, walking to the bench, dejected, while the presumed victors bounce on their toes, grinning as if they already know the end of the movie and can’t wait to see your face while you watch.

The stakes of every game ventured into the intersections of pride, respect, a weekend of immortality on the block for someone who got especially hot from three or worked a crossover at just the right moment to send someone flailing backward, like a ghost of their future self latched on to their jersey to get them the fuck out the way of whatever was coming.

Hushed prayers climbing atop other hushed prayers, some mouths moving but no sound coming out, fitted caps removed and resting inside clasped hands, cats who I knew hadn’t been back inside a church since they emerged, screaming, from the waters of baptism nervously reaching back toward God.

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 little while, before falling to its knees.

When you create the conditions of

war, you get to name the places it happens.

The student parking lot was lined with used cars, none of them from the decade we were living in.

Reveling in what we did have, knowing that we could have so much less.

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.

I wish all failure could be as beautiful as the failures that arrive to us midair, a reality setting in that we are incapable and yet still in flight.

But I blink, 0:30 and through a blur, my past sparks back to life. I close my eyes and I fall back into the ocean of our past selves.

Monuments. In my dreams, we are monuments. We get to be somewhere that is ours, forever. A place no other hands can reach.

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.

So many of us try to play our gods for fools. It’s incredible that we think they wouldn’t notice.

Walk through a park where the weight of summer has broken the necks of the sunflowers, sent their faces moaning near the soil they burst from, and imagine that even the flowers must try to make a deal with whoever their god is, hoping for a better result than their current predicament.

Then again, as bad as I was at lying to others, I was always at my worst when I was lying to myself.

On the other side of the walls, the stars that I cannot see are surely glinting like a gold tooth in the mouth of some dark-skinned and adored living ancestor throwing their head back and letting a laugh play a symphony across the night sky.

A little more money in your pocket than the money you spent on a ticket, scratched off with one of the last coins you have to your name.

Spring, twirling out from behind the doldrums for a brief audition, just to check and see if it’s still got it—and it does.

And lord, yes, there are those songs about getting in a car and driving and driving and driving. These are often the most urgent songs about exits. A person can’t afford a plane ticket but can afford a couple tanks of gas, and they own just enough shit to fit in a trunk or a back seat, but not much else. Jo Dee Messina says let’s flip a coin. Let fate do the work, but either way, we’re gonna get gone for a little while.

As much as I hate to summon the good brothers Boyz II Men into the room, they made quite the habit of falling to pieces within this very specific container. Rolling around on the ground, falling to their knees in the rain, fucking up coordinating silk outfits and whatnot.

The trick is, if the team isn’t worth rooting for, find a player to attach yourself to. A player who defines whatever you believe your own personal struggle to be, for better or worse. That’s your player, the one you live and die by.

And there is no language I have, even now, for what happens to the eyes of someone you love in a moment when they are both ashamed of you and afraid for you all at once.

Don’t try to scale the mountain of your shame all at once.

A city is a vessel. A mirror for our past selves. And so it gets away with its lying, sometimes.

This moment is lost, but soon there will be another season, another blank slate. Possibility awaits. If you can believe in it long enough, destiny rotates, tilts its wild and colorful feathers toward everyone eventually.

What if it is most comfortable against the ropes? The bruised and weary fighter grinning in the face of the juggernaut, too arrogant to realize that it was always a trap.

have felt like a champion before, even having won nothing but the desire to be alive in a day I woke up not wanting to be alive in.

This obsession, this continued pursuit of the right underdog to believe in—it arrives to me so easily because I know who wins, most often. I know this, and I still run out into the streets, thinking it might stop them or at least prolong their inevitable victory parade. That’s the trick. Stealing back one game here or there. Make it home alive. Extend the series.