There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

But we know our enemies by how foolishly they trample upon what we know as affection. How quickly they find another language for what they cannot translate as love.

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.

And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.

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

So much of the machinery of race- and/or culture-driven fear relies on who is willing to be convinced of what.

The first way I felt myself operating on the other side of America’s fear was being young and idolizing the people America was trying to convince me to be afraid of.

Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.

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.

I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

When the world has grown weary with indulging our selfish living, I hope to not be alive for whichever apocalypse is the one that ends humanity.

I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved.

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.

The space between what you can get and what people think you deserve to have is sometimes a crack, but sometimes a canyon.

I have sat at the feet of poets who told me that there is power in withholding. In not offering the parts of yourself that people are most eager to see.

Even with no food in the cabinets and no clothes in my closet, I knew I could piece together something that might hold the attention of someone on the block who had less than I did.

I can tell you about guys who didn’t hoop to get away from the streets, or to get out of anywhere. Guys who hooped because they wanted to be respected on the streets they loved. They wanted to make themselves infamous in the place that held them, and that, too, is a type of making it.

Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.

Home isn’t a choice one makes; home is a set of circumstances.

What good is a witness in a country obsessed with forgetting?

“Miracle” is another word for deception. Who or what can make someone believe anything that would be otherwise unbelievable.

no one should place their heart in the hands of a human in hopes for salvation

the way children sometimes pray, a collage of names and half-formed wishes thrown up to the sky where someone surely has to untangle the fabric of it all before handing it off to someone else.

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.

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

as I don’t learn from my repeated heartbreaks as much as I learn to catalog them, to pull them from their cases and admire them with a type of fascination for a while before locking them away again.

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 witnesses remain, regardless of whether or not the savior shows himself.

A better phrase is that I grew into poverty and simply learned how to navigate it as efficiently as possible through various disasters.

but I believe failing the imagination of others might be the crime from which all other crimes are born,

hustling is easiest when you are in a room people don’t believe you belong in.

The phrase Ball don’t lie is one way of saying You get what you deserve. You, who knows what you’ve done but still might hope to benefit from some reward for your misdeeds, even (or especially) the ones of microscopic proportions.

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 know the truth about America, that nowhere is forgiving, and so the unforgiving familiar is better than anywhere else.

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.

Life and death, determined by the haphazard tourism of people who believe they are eternally at war with everyone but themselves.

Any time you know you only got ten seconds to get up, you ain’t gonna worry about anything but just getting up first.

It’s the most vicious trick, trying to dull the edge of the knife that keeps pressing into your grief, your rage, your despair.

When two lies collide, it is the aftermath of the damage that unravels us.

I’ve told you before: nostalgia is a relentless hustler. Relies on how bad anyone wants to retrieve a feeling, or even an idea of a feeling.