There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

And so a place defines itself by its brightest moments, the best of who makes it out. The trophies that march through its downtowns, the children chasing them, reaching up to see the reflections of their hands in the gold.

Cleveland is a city that is overwhelmed by a desire to believe in something beyond what people outside of the place have ascribed to it.

There’s always next year. 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.

And of course, of course it is an optical illusion of sorts. The ball is actually far higher than the blue-tinted sideline, but then again, every sunset you’ve ever seen is a trick. Most of the beauty I have surrendered myself to is tucking some far less delicious honesty beneath its magic, and so why not this?

If there is a heaven, I suppose there we can weep over the scrapbook of our lives while we wait for the living to climb the constellations. But not now, is what I’m told. Nostalgia is only for the brokenhearted. For the displeased or disaffected, the ones who need to look to the past to give meaning to their present.

I’m told there is nothing in my childhood that will save me from what’s coming whenever what’s coming arrives. The old devils may resemble the new devils if you’re not careful. Cuffs, cells, and caskets.

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.

To look back, to give in to the place where fear and curiosity intersect, is to sacrifice the ground you’ve gained.

Besides, let me tell it and I don’t care about anyone’s regular season unless there’s some jewelry swinging from the neck of it. It is hard work to lose only nine games. Harder work still to lift a trophy.

I know that fear can also be one of devotion’s many mothers.

I know a city is a container for heartbreak.

I have lied to myself to keep loving a city, to keep myself fixed in the place I am because I’m afraid I know the truth about America, that nowhere is forgiving, and so the unforgiving familiar is better than anywhere else.

Yeah, we could take this motherfucker apart brick by brick, but then we’d have more bricks than hands willing to rebuild anything, and ain’t that the way of it.

I believed it when Cudi said he sees ghosts not all haunting is of an evil sort sometimes it’s love sometimes the people who never wanted to leave find a way to stay

How does a person’s blood get washed away from a sidewalk on a block they lived and loved in, on a block where they waved to neighbors, carried groceries home?

I don’t trust anyone who isn’t from where I’m from, who doesn’t live where I live, to report anything as “suspicious” or “not suspicious,” and yet this is the ecosystem that I’ve known and had to rely on, that people I love are subjected to. Tourists wandering through areas they don’t have any connection to, speculating on people they couldn’t care less about. Life and death, determined by the haphazard tourism of people who believe they are eternally at war with everyone but themselves.

I wanted to arrive, breathless with rage. I wanted to look toward anyone who was still on the fence, still wrapped in the arms of mythological comfort. I wanted everyone to know. There hasn’t been a city built yet that is incapable of burning down.

And I’m from Ohio, which means everyone I roll with from this godforsaken state dreams themselves an underdog.

The history of an underdog can be distilled down to their brightest moment and then held on to forever.

And this is why, in Ohio, so few people I know turned away from the Cleveland Cavaliers, even when it looked bleak at the end of Game 4, when it seemed like this would be another disappointment. But what if it wasn’t? 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.

I 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. I deserve something for that, even if it is a parade of my own making.

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.

there is no clock that turns back so quickly that life might be gifted to the dead there is no resurrection from the panicked ticking that haunts the already-eager fingers on triggers and I am talking real triggers the bullet travels faster than the speed 2:18 of sound and so what to make then of the cop who pulls up in a car and maybe shouts but maybe doesn’t but definitely fires 2:17 a bullet that arrives before the sound of his voice what to make of this besides someone who wanted someone else dead someone who made up their mind who did not in doing so imagine the casket or the mother crying atop it

In the midst of mourning Tamir and marching for Tamir, I grew weary of any conversation that returned to and landed on his appearance. How he looked, if he was big for his age. No one bandying these debates around ever really specified what rested on the other side of them: what it might mean if he were, in fact, “big for his age.” I suppose the reality is that no one had to say what many of us already knew. People were looking for a way out, a way to feel all right about the murder. Sure, it looked bad, but if he was large enough or dangerous enough, then what could anyone be expected to do, really?

This weaving in and out of childhood is a convenient weapon, one not afforded to everyone.

I am not sure when childhood was first coded as innocent, but it has often struck me that to be able to understand childhood as a window curtained by monolithic innocence takes a very specific kind of commitment to mythology, one that I haven’t been able to touch. I don’t believe in innocence, which is another weapon of convenience. I am not sure what it means to pursue or even be stagnantly held by so-called innocence in a vicious ecosystem of living and of having to survive.

Who among us has conflated the myth of innocence with the reality of goodness? With who does or doesn’t deserve to live? Let us cut through the bullshit and say what we know. None of this, right now, is about who does or doesn’t look like a child. It is about what the idea of a child embodies and how easily the American imagination can be seduced by what it believes a child to be. Many of us came into the world screaming and then spent our living enduring the world’s shouting back. There might have been innocence once, before our eyes adjusted, before our memories took shape. Back when our parents whispered in our ears as we drifted off to sleep.

yes, city of the cavalier, which is both to be a defender of a king and also to show inadequate concern for the living, depending on which definition in the dictionary your finger lands upon.

When two lies collide, it is the aftermath of the damage that unravels us. Like walking on the gray floor of storm clouds until the sky pulls apart, becomes an unblemished blue. A miracle for those below, but for you, an ending.

The axis upon which success and pleasure tilts is flimsy, and some days I would have rather failed but been in awe of the rapturous joy I got to fold into with my crew,

Tell me if you have ever built a heaven out of nothing, and then tell me what it would take for you to look for a new one somewhere else. The people who circle this heaven from the outside wouldn’t know this. Might think that everyone is trying to make it somewhere else, through ball, through music. That’s another myth. Crack rock or jump shot. Courts and cages and caskets. Everyone getting out one way or another, or so some might say.

Some with no imagination, who speed through the hood, who speculate about sneakers ornamenting telephone poles. Who read stories of gunshots dragging serenity from the arms of nighttime. Some who imagine a place with no fathers, who—relying on that myth—believe mothers and grandmothers incapable of the type of ferocious affection that might pull a child back from any ledge they run toward. I never wanted to be anywhere other than where I was, my two feet planted on concrete that was breaking, but satisfied to still be of use. I never wanted to stray far from the shitty speakers weighing down old trunks, the symphony of bass and rattling metal, the smoke that drifts from an open window, an arm swinging from it, a wrist dangling out the side, a gold bracelet on that wrist, the sunlight running its fingers along the links, the shine of it, echoing for blocks. My people are here, and my people built the here in their image, and at least for a few precious years, there was nowhere to make it out of. We built the impossible utopia. You can’t see the fence, but it’s there. It’ll keep you out, too, if you don’t come correct. The gangs were never our enemies, but the people who look upon where we stay and see gangs in every gathering certainly were our enemies.

Understand this: some of our dreams were never your dreams, and will never be. When we were young, so many people I loved just wanted to live forever, where we were. And so yes, if you are scared, stay scared. Stay far enough away from where our kinfolk rest so that a city won’t get any ideas. They will burn down or build over a neighborhood for nothing.

Doesn’t matter how many stars are built or born on a cramped court, doesn’t matter who gets a court or a community center named after them. But trust: there are more of us, always. Whole gang of us. Some of us carved our names into trees, into the wet concrete of new sidewalks. Some of us took small knives to metal and wrote our names into the death traps of the playground.

And so we stay, one way or another. We never make it out, and we never disappear. Permanence is th...

And it is both beautiful and heartbreaking to imagine this, that we go on living while a past version of ourselves remains locked, peacefully, in a euphoric dream. What I have been asking, the door I have been pawing at this entire time, is for a reimagining of eternity. A reversal, perhaps. Not that our happiest, freest selves are fastened to a dream, while we exit and return to the living world. But that our exit is where the dreaming begins, and our real, actual living is the place where we remain at our most joyous, time moving forward by small inches, each of us growing only seconds older with each passing year.

The mind can only hold so many faces. I see parts of the people I loved as a child everywhere, but never their entire, younger selves. We might still be alive back there, on the beautiful and bowing branch of youth. No one has been buried. No one has learned to load a gun. No one knows the price of anything that might sell good in any season. The weapon that might be your undoing hasn’t been invented yet.