There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I have never figured out where the line is drawn between a foolish prayer and a worthy prayer, and so I grew to believe that all of my prayers were foolish, even the ones heaved into the air in desperation, which might be the most foolish of them all. The prayers you have also maybe thrown skyward in a rushed moment of despair, pressing up against the realities that are known to be inevitable, spoken to a god you haven’t thought to speak to in months or years. The kind that unfold into bargaining—you’ll be better, you’ll go to church sometimes. You’ll stop lying as much. Please, keep the lights on for another day, and please, let the check finally come in. Please, let the name of the newly dead on the TV screen be another person and not my person, let the photo be wrong this one time, let the door open and let them walk through. Please, take the cancer away before it finishes running through the same beloved elder who once pointed at the sky and told me of your daily work, warned me to not waste your time, and here I am now, telling you what I need and telling you I need it today, I needed it yesterday, it is always almost too late but here I am again.

A heart, sometimes, breaks slowly and without ceremony. I haven’t been able to make sense of how or why it happens to some of us and not others. My pal who has been recklessly and relentlessly in love with his partner since they were two starry-eyed seventeen-year-olds who met at a punk show unfurls a string of advice that seems both practical and entirely overwhelming in equal measure. It’s all about what you’re willing to forgive, he tells me. You have to choose what to ignore every now and then, he tells me. Sure, there are things that begin to grate on you, he says. But there is beauty in even that—being so intimately familiar with the nuances of a single person that you are comfortable even with their encyclopedia of small annoyances, even as those annoyances snap at your heels for years, and then a lifetime.

the sound of dirt being placed upon a child’s grave travels faster than the bullet but cannot stop it 2:16 no matter the symphony of moaning no matter the weight of the earth no matter.