There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

through. 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.

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 would like to be granted an audience with the architect of longing.

I believe that misery doesn’t need company as much as I believe that misery is company. Damn good company too, if you can get it honest enough.

But lord knows I love to be a spectator to someone else’s mess every now and then, since my own is so frequently unappealing (and relentlessly immovable), and so I do love a song where someone is doing some begging.

& it is harder to sell this on the evening news but the fire is a baptism, the fire says Get gone & we can start clean & so then what isn’t your own can become your own if it is all some vast & empty burned-down nothing at the end of a long night & I know this isn’t generous to the shop owners & the elders who have lived on a block for decades & wanted to die on a block that was at least close to how they remembered it, but what can I do to convince you that fire is not the villain & the person who lights a match isn’t a villain

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. I have seen enough and I prefer the path of least resistance. There is a shortage of imagination when it comes to the pleasures of simplicity. I would not like to answer any questions. I would like the gates to open upon my arrival, and I would like to walk in untouched. Some people think they should gain entry to heaven without first dying, and some people decide they don’t want death, and they certainly don’t want whatever heaven you’re offering.

No one likes to imagine God needing rest, but then again, it is impossible to fathom any being required to love that many people who are still living, still teeming with questions and demands.

Praise the fantasies that can spring to life while all potential for agony rests.