There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Let us consider, again, what it means to have a place as reprieve, a people as reprieve, somewhere the survival comes easy.

I believe there is a sliver of difference between being naked and being bare; I believe that difference also exists between those who enjoy food and those who enjoy a meal. A meal is the whole universe that food exists within—a universe that deserves its own type of ritual and honoring before getting into the containers of it.

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

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. It has less to do with what one is or isn’t wearing or showing, and more to do with how poorly one keeps the inevitable hidden or how long a person can hold back the undoing (pleasureful or less so) that awaits them.

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.

And in the hour that is our hour, a window opens and we can breathe out all the sad stuff. Find a closet for our tapestry of aches. Both of our mothers had died, which might bond us in another world, if we were considering falling in love and not simply pouring ourselves into what would otherwise be vast, lonely gaps of living.

The people we love deserve to return to the places they left with the things they love intact.

If you are someone who is from a place not everyone made it out of, or if you have been to enough funerals where parents or grandparents weep over the caskets of their babies and grandbabies, if you know forever is a hand dealt by an uncertain dealer, you may wear the signs of your aging like thick, heavy gold, weighing the body down, but still stunning—unavoidable in its shine.

I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

“To leave a place…you’d best leave everything behind; all your possessions, including memory. Traveling’s not as easy as it’s made out to be.” —Virginia Hamilton

you are a reflection of who loves you.

you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you,

The problem was that, to those narrative-makers, LeBron James had skipped the line. 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.

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.

In the high school career of LeBron James, there was access to his dominance, but not always access to whatever struggles he might have been pushing through. And it proved hard for people to stay fascinated with dominance, especially if they were on the losing si...

It’s about a history of America selling dreams back to its people for so long that they stopped knowing what to do when someone they wanted to keep at arm’s length also got to buy into the fantasy.

I’ve never been more afraid than I have been curious

A dunk contest is where one goes to execute some far-flung dream of what the body is capable of. It is where one goes to fail, often spectacularly. 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.

They wanted to make themselves infamous in the place that held them, and that, too, is a type of making it. People just looking for a place to feel invincible, for a few hours, in a city that might otherwise swallow them whole.

Someone who ages, thank God. Someone who lives beyond their past selves.

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

If enough things crumble, if enough things turn to ash, I cannot convince you that there was anything better here once. You are one of the lucky ones if your name is remembered in a city that is beloved but sometimes unforgiving.

Every moment is a homecoming,

In my dreams, we are monuments. We get to be somewhere that is ours, forever.

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