There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

black hair talks in a language that is entirely its own, and a language that not all hair can achieve—even among the multitudes of black folks, some hair can speak in a manner that other hair might not be afforded.

An opponent is different than an enemy, even if you see that opponent twice a year.

Shit talking is a right, a gift, a mercy with a lineage all its own.

you were to go back now and look at or listen to some of the commentary from white college basketball experts and announcers going into the sophomore season of the Fab Five, you will find the occasional odd fixation on baldness as something menacing.

anyone who did not love this team was my enemy. Anyone who might wish to pull apart their brilliance, to tame or temper their flourish, was my enemy.

I propose that the difference between being naked and being bare is that in a state of nakedness, the end can be seen even if it hasn’t arrived yet.

How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?

That’s the miracle of hair. It allows us our mistakes and still returns to us, potentially ready to endure more.

Fear is one thing that can carry an unassuming heart to the gates of love, or at least gates that might be in the same neighborhood as the gates of love.

knew what it was like to keep something close, just in case there was some error in the universe.

We will leave our enemies behind here and never turn to face them again. But this is not a story about heroes, either. Not everyone will die. No one will live forever.

Tourists believe the hood is a monolith, not an ecosystem that can function differently from block to block, from corner to corner.

placed a hand on my shoulder, gold orbiting three knuckles. It’s going to be okay, he said, and for the first time, I considered that it might not be. It is one thing to experience death and another to understand it to be possible on its own terms. To grasp the certainty of its arrival but still cling to a hope for that certainty to come in a very specific way, at a very specific time, after a life has fulfilled all of its promise. Death, ushering a person toward an upturned beam of light after they’ve thrown up their hands and said Thank you, my life has been good, I want to see the people I miss.

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.

A community learns how to manage on its own. Gangs also exist to keep a neighborhood safe from outside threats, after all. That has always been a part of their history. There are codes to be followed and punishments for not following them. The hood becomes its own city, governed by no one, governed by everyone.

When you create the conditions of war, you get to name the places it happens.

afford. I couldn’t afford to park on campus, so I had to find another place, and in the process of that finding, I was in the clutches of the cops, of the “concerned” neighborhood.

The athlete is supposed to work for a better life but make the struggle visible. With no struggle for the comfortable viewer to revel in, there’s no pity to balance out the envy. There’s nothing left to hold up the narrative.

To stunt on those you live in close proximity to is also a type of intimacy. It requires a level of knowing—I know the heights that you cannot reach, the ones that I can barely ascend to, but can still ascend to, at least today. And I love you for your limits, I love all of us for what we do and don’t have in this beautifully unbearable container of heat, of sirens, of bike chains popping and black sneakers that have seen better days.

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.

And besides, it might do all of us some good to reconsider what making it even means, or at least to honor a world where making it is not defined by the glamorous exit, not only by television cameras, not only by coming back with a pair of trophies riding shotgun.

Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower that we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not. Both landlords and tenants within our own sadness, and sometimes it just happens. Grows while you sleep. Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.

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

Until an architect of the miraculous takes over a game, and the deception becomes real. This is really happening. All of the good you believed would arrive, suddenly has. All of the bad that is coming, certainly will.

The point, I think, is that as one life begins to ascend, another begins its descent.

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

Migration is sometimes a requirement, an act of survival.

An obsession with suffering on the path to triumph is not uniquely American but does manifest itself in uniquely American ways.

The politics of place aren’t necessarily always linked to the politics of staying as much as they are linked to the politics of knowing.

but fire is a song, fire be a whole symphony if you allow it to be.

How quickly can we get past the part where we feel everything and cross the other threshold, gasping and numb.

And sometimes, when what we desire and what we see aren’t enough, the manufacturing of an enemy takes work.

Yes, the real gift heartbreak leaves behind is the gift of the most delicious delusions.

There was always the foregone conclusion—our affections didn’t have to be temporary, but our proximity did. They would leave and we’d figure it out, or we wouldn’t.

There are places where people make it and places where people make it out of. It seems there are far more of the latter than there are of the former. Every place has its limits—how much it can grow, what of its population it can reasonably swallow in the name of that growth.

One thing about a hustle is that if you are in too deep for too long, it is possible that you might gain a misunderstanding of your limits. If you make a life around the rush that exists at the end of the trick, it can be easy to lose yourself in that feeling, in how people must see you, walking off on the shoulders of your victories.

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

A city is a vessel. A mirror for our past selves. And so it gets away with its lying, sometimes. I lie to myself about the places I love, even when I don’t want to. Even when the places I love don’t look like the places I love anymore.

a place defines itself by its brightest moments, the best of who makes it out.

The moments immediately after waking from a rapturous state of elsewhere can be the harshest mirror.

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.

Their leaving mothered longing, which mothered looking backward, again, to a time before now. I say I was happier in the past because the pain of the past is a relic.

And so I do not fear death, the only thing promised. The steady breath I have felt growing heavier with each year I survive again and again.

I know a city is a container for heartbreak. That’s what it holds better than anything else. Sometimes the heartbreaks come in blood. Sometimes they refresh when the fall comes, when a stadium turns its lights back on.