There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

The sweat, I believed, was a signifier. This is how I knew my father was somewhere beyond. Blown past the doorstep of pleasure and well into a tour of its many-roomed home, an elsewhere that only he could touch. One that required such labor to arrive at, what else but sweat could there be as evidence?

its abundance stifled with intention.

And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you. Yes, do not waste language on our enemies, but an enemy, to me, implies a permanence. A thorn that cannot be removed.

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.

isn’t it funny the lengths our enemies go to in order to say I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me?

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.

So many of my childhood impulses relied on the logic of taking to the air and then figuring out a plan on the way down.

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.

Sacrifices that, sometimes, don’t have your desires at the end of them.

The cloak of time has yet to grow so long that I have surrendered my childhood.

I believe that I was a child once because I am afraid today.

Yes, Lord, 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.

I don’t trust people who don’t love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead.

above all, you are a reflection of who loves you.

If you’ve played enough basketball, or watched enough basketball, you know there are some games that are over when they make it to overtime.

even when it wasn’t, people would point to his little brother Andrew in the stands, studying the game like an eager hawk, and they’d mumble He’s the one. He’s going to be special. I always loved this part the most, even if the mythology of the always-emerging younger sibling didn’t come to fruition every time (though, admittedly, it did bear fruit more times than not). I simply liked knowing that there was someone else arriving behind the someone I already knew.

It is a gift to resemble someone who has already done something memorable.

When a city names a place unlivable, it suggests that there is something wrong or damaged about the people who do live there. It suggests that their lives are expendable, down to the homes or apartments they live in. And just like that, the lens turns toward property, toward land. Toward the value of vacancy. Don’t play like you haven’t heard this one before. When you create the conditions of war, you get to name the places it happens.

It was an acceptance, forced through a lens of glamour and sold back to record labels, to fashion brands, to vehicle companies.

Surviving something that a great many others wouldn’t have the heart for.

an ode to staying in a place and knowing it might kill you.

There is no language I can find for the affection of repeated survival.

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. 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.

It relies on making war and surviving war a part of the American fabric by making the aesthetics of war cool. And then makes those aesthetics available for the public to buy.

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

what is real and not real is sometimes simply a matter of who is witnessing the miracle and who can be tricked into a suspension of disbelief at the altar of light.

To stunt on those you live in close proximity to is also a type of intimacy.

I don’t need the elsewhere to be better, I just need it to be somewhere else.

and so I must tell you that anything that can be taken, will be taken. You are lucky if it is sudden. You are lucky if you survive the forest of reaching hands. The open window and the aching voice that floods a room and holds you firm to the night,

The people who will show up to praise your return, simply because it is a return. Doesn’t even have to be spectacular, though it often is.

It is more frightening when everything said about you is true. When you are as good as the streets said you were, or even better. When you are a child but also not a child, also a phenom, also impossible to fathom.

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.

Don’t talk to me about any version of making it that ends with someone like Estaban Weaver being described as a failure. Not if you weren’t here. Not if you don’t know what it’s like for a city to make you into a savior before you finish ninth grade. Not if, despite that, you survived.

You are one of the lucky ones if your name is remembered in a city that is beloved but sometimes unforgiving. If there are no weeds tall enough to eclipse your past, or to reach the heights of your future.

sometimes the wrong crowd is simply the crowd that loves you the best. The crowd that sees you the clearest.

The father not only as a nuisance but also as a haunting. A memory of that which could have been but was stolen by violence.

There are those who pray for a savior and then a savior arrives, and through their arrival, that savior becomes godlike. Home isn’t a choice one makes; home is a set of circumstances.

was a hustler, after all. I’d come up around hustlers. There were no circumstances that I believed I couldn’t hustle my way out of when the time came. Fuck the noise, it was going to be a good summer. A summer where I wouldn’t have to pray my way out of any fresh terror.

I am most drawn to the concept of the witness as it presents itself in its two primary realms, the legal and the spiritual. And depending on where you come from or what you come up around, you might be likely to not wanna witness a damn thing.

But I will say that as a child, I was foolish enough to not understand desperation. To not think I would ever be desperate enough to need to pray.

This is how you know a city has started to become your city. When it moves alongside you, a dance partner who you can never out-step.

But there was rage. I came to God once. I made a deal. I said If you give me this, I will give you anything. We both knew I was a liar. I suppose God is under no obligation to be merciful about our deceptions.

One way sports works is because of the fact that many of us do, in fact, survive on the miracles and mercies of others.

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

Yes, I saw what I saw, but I do not believe it and my not believing must mean that there is something greater at work, something I am chasing the language for, even as I watch it shrink on the horizon,

The work of the other is to make people believers through the evidence of their survival, even when they know they shouldn’t have survived.

I am not satisfied with what I am given I can fuck around & turn water into anything

shit I made a life outta running from all the things I was tired of &

by the time LeBron came around, a nickname wasn’t always what you were known by all of the time, what announcers called out after you’ve orchestrated an especially scintillating play. The nickname is sometimes what you are called by and sometimes it is whatever encases you, whatever you are born into and then carry for a lifetime, and whatever comes after.