There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

But we know our enemies by how foolishly they trample upon what we know as affection. How quickly they find another language for what they cannot translate as love.

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.

and isn’t it funny the lengths our enemies go to in order to say I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me?

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

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 floater, the most romantic shot in the game when done right, guided toward the rim with a heave and a wish, how the follow-through after the ball leaves the hand can look like an overeager wave, like saying goodbye to a person you never wanted to leave.

The floater is beautiful for how it relies on height, how the shot itself turns the ball into a bit of a show-off, obsessed with drama, almost pausing in the air to make sure you get its good side before it begins to twirl downward.

I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved.

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.

America relies on making the soldier both an inspiration and an aspiration. It relies on making war and surviving war a part of the American fabric by making the aesthetics of war cool.

There is a dictionary definition of what a miracle is, and there is a biblical definition, and though the two are close enough to touch—like the interpretations of “witness”—there is a slight difference in tone, and in mission.

The work of one is to make people believers, even in moments of assumed mundanity. The work of the other is to make people believers through the evidence of their survival, even when they know they shouldn’t have survived.

With enough repetition anything can become a religion it doesn’t matter if it works or not

I steal a little bit of control back by knowing that I have none at all over who stays and who goes, or when they stay or go.

When the heart breaks slowly, gradually, in a way that seems almost inevitable, you can barely even notice it. It happens in a small series of whispers, and then one day, there is a corner of it that sighs to pieces while you box up a photo or donate a bag of old clothes.