There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

And somewhere on the other side of the walls, the stars run a tongue across the lips of night and someone is thinking of how you are surviving, speaking your name, even at a whisper, into what we will call the heavens, and praying the sound of it reaches you.

There are places where questions are a salve, and there are places where questions are a weapon, pushed into a wound, and it’s best to learn the difference between the two before you end up in some place you don’t wanna be, acting a damn fool.

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

I was foolish then. In 2003, when I took this job, I hadn’t yet seen the inside of a jail or slept on a street. I hadn’t yet become entirely invisible.

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.

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.

A sentence is an arbitrary thing. It begins and ends at the whims of its most vicious architects. Who is to say what good behavior is when the reward for it is being a little more free? If I will play the game and submit myself to a nefarious binary, I will say that I have been good. I have never been innocent, but I have tried to be good. Even when I robbed, I was good. It is good to survive, after all, if one is to be sentenced to living.

love can’t quiet the taunts which echo until we wake gasping into the screams of borrowed light

I have opened Instagram and made my way to the page of a person I miss. I do this, in part, with the hope that they are missing me, wherever they are. That they have littered their Instagram stories with sad songs and dull photos of the sky. Meals for one. Walks through the doldrums of winter, leaving behind only one set of footprints.

I am of a particular emotional makeup, and because of this, I believe that misery doesn’t need company as much as I believe that misery is company.

A heart, sometimes, breaks slowly and without ceremony.

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.

He once told me that he’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t a bad person, I was just a bad decision-maker. When I perked up a bit at this, thankful for the affirmation, he responded, “No, you don’t understand. That’s actually more concerning.”

I told myself that by September I’d be gone. Somewhere else. I’d leave behind the town I loved because I wasn’t convinced the town loved me back anymore. It isn’t me, I’d tell myself. It’s this place. I never had a chance.

The song is called “We Are LeBron,” and if you are, right now, counting syllables in your head, wondering if this is a riff off of “We Are the World,” you have already done the required math to understand this level of desperation.

Even if you’re bored or unhappy. Even if we don’t dream in the same language anymore. We’re familiar to each other, and that depth of knowing is an intimacy that can cover at least some of the sins that might otherwise tear us apart, isn’t it?

I find very little shame in the absurdity of the pathetic when it’s all a person feels like they have in their toolbox to keep close what they imagine is better than absence.

There are few things more intimate than the history made when a person touches a place, runs a hand along it for decades at a time.

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.

I would like to believe in this idea of ecstasy, or at least a moment when there is awareness of what consumes us but no physical feeling to attach it to.

And speaking of burning for a brief, candescent moment before there is nothing left to be felt, this, too, is longing. This, too, is at least one stage of heartbreak. The earliest stage, when any damage will do and it is seductive to watch some shit go up in flames, even though the burning won’t bring back anything any of us miss or love.

It isn’t so much that if you see something enough, you begin to believe it. It’s that the belief is already there, already planted and waiting to be ignited by seeing, and the seeing could be anything.

There is a mountain between the immediacy of anguish and the far-off hopefulness of clarity, and it is easiest to convince anyone scaling its outskirts that anything they are feeling is justified.

I am no fool and I do not roll with fools and so no one I rolled with thought Cleveland would actually win a championship before LeBron James, paired with two other All-Stars, would win a championship. Cleveland win an NBA title—with what? The shell of a team left behind by its once-savior? It wasn’t ever about that. It was about dreaming through the brutality of leaving, of being left.

I need anyone who has ever hurt me to know that I am doing more than just surviving.

I say I want a championship and mean I am looking for a light so consuming that it overwhelms all absence.

I didn’t grow up in the church but have spent enough time aligned with both religion and sports to know there is no gospel richer than the gospel of suffering, of living through large stretches devoid of pleasure for the sake of reaching some place beyond your current circumstances and feeling as though you have truly earned a right to be there.

it was always about the enslaved / the mercy of flight / no chains to hold / what the sky desired / freedom beyond language

I used to talk about “growing up poor” as if it is something that left me, no longer hovered over my life well into my twenties. A better phrase is that I grew into poverty and simply learned how to navigate it as efficiently as possible through various disasters.

since me and my crew would never miss out on a good hustle, we didn’t mind going to the games and turning our five-dollar tickets into near-courtside seats, even if the games were an absolute calamity—hardly an identifiable sport at all and more like a rapidly unfurling circus of incidents that might resemble basketball,

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. Watch the box score, not the scoreboard. There’s glory in the box score, if you get lucky enough.

You got it hard enough growing up, no telling what you can make fit when the measurements say otherwise.

If the whole idea is to project oneself onto a player and then ride through a bad season with them as your sole beacon, I gravitated toward Boobie Gibson for how heavily his perceived failures seemed to weigh on him. 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.

And it was also the way fans reacted to his present struggles, when pressed against his past promise. Walking out of the arena, you’d hear He’s got all of the tools, I don’t know why he can’t figure it out or some version of I guess he’s just not going to be who we thought he was. And so how could I not be on his side, knowing what I know 1:40 about disappointment. About not being who you thought I was or would become. The places I’ve led people to, promising fountains, clear rivers, all manner of thirst-quenching possibilities, only to pull us all, once again, along an endless desert.

What I mean when I say that a villain stays a villain is that our damage remains even after we’ve been punished for it, and there is very little control any of us have over our own absolution.

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.

There is something lost there, an incalculable loss. Something beyond the myth of innocence. The imagination fractures in the fraction of a moment like this. Someone believed that, no matter how bad you fucked up, there was always going to be a place they could pull you back from, or pull you back toward. Until they see you, untouchable, behind glass.

It is hard, in that moment, bending into a person you love, knowing you will never be who you once were in their mind.

Don’t try to scale the mountain of your shame all at once. Maybe no one will forgive you, but you’re still alive and so someone has.

It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave. Yes, when LeBron left, the reactions made enough sense to me, I suppose. But there was a part of me that felt entirely unsurprised. People leave this place. There are midwestern states that are far less discernible on a blank map, sure. Even with an understanding of direction, I am known to fuck up the order of the Dakotas. I’ve been known to point at a great many square-like landscapes while weakly mumbling “Nebraska?” and so I get it, we don’t have it too bad. People at least claim to know that Ohio is shaped like a heart. A jagged heart. A heart with sharp edges. A heart as a weapon. That’s why so many people make their way elsewhere.

But still, there are the places people live in until they become the person who can survive somewhere better, and by 2010, too many of my friends were in different time zones.

that is a privilege of knowing the leaving is not permanent. When it is permanent, the only audience for all that moaning is God, who, despite an alleged track record of miracles, has no interest in the pardoning of grief through resurrection and who, I imagine, grows weary of the unbearable questioning shouted out, piercing the middle of a night.

I love the dead, too, because I have no choice. Because there are so many of them. Because in the spring of 2011, when the Cavs weren’t winning a damn thing, I buried Cam’s ashes under a sycamore tree in Cleveland, which I only knew was a sycamore tree because of how Cam would sometimes point to a tree that looked like it, and then point to a scar running across the side of his arm, curved sharply, like a wicked grin, and he’d say Sycamore tree fucked me up when I was a kid. Fuck those things. And so it was decided, bury him at the feet of his one true enemy, maybe he’d grow again there, grow into something bigger and taller, something too big and tall to die in this lifetime or in any next one.

I love the dead who have made fools of time—the elders who smoked two packs a day right up until the middle of their ninth decade, who survived and survived out of pure spite.

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.

I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.

On any day in a violent country, a politician might say “This is not what America is.” As the aforementioned tanks poured into town, my city’s mayor stood behind a podium and said, “This country is better than what we’re seeing today.” The hustle is that everyone talks about the “today” as a single day that materialized, untethered, with no connection to any history before it or any history that will come after it. As if a moment is not within a braid of moments that defines a place.

To make a myth of a country is a misguided extension of kindness, but it is also a hustle.

Trapped within the mouth of a predator, a true hustler will talk about the glow of the predator’s teeth as soft, romantic lighting.

What is sweat but decoration, jewelry upon the extended arms beckoning people toward a revival?