There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

At first, I thought what he was saying was We all got your back, but the more I thought about it, I think he was actually saying No one in here suffers alone, which is close to the same thing but also decidedly not.

someone might be wishing you weren’t such a damn fool but missing you all the same.

Sometimes, if you stare into darkness for long enough, anything you’ve ever wanted can emerge.

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

The point, I think, is that as one life begins to ascend, another begins its descent. It’s unremarkable. It happens to everyone, everywhere, even if you don’t know the person who is watching your rise from a distance and cursing their own shit luck.

And speaking of tickets, my god, 2:00 bless our grandmothers who spent their last years playing the lottery and never winning.

Numbers are as unpredictable as any other god, I suppose.

And yes, of course, this cycle preys on the poor and on the desperate, but if you’ve ever been poor enough and desperate enough, there is no open mouth you won’t blow a prayer into, hoping that it is blown back out, one day, wherever your darkest hour descends.

Luck isn’t always about what wins and sometimes is about what you can keep close. What doesn’t get you glory but what has also never done you wrong.

And also, I admit, I believed that if I just lost enough—if I just kept losing and kept struggling in the face of an all-seeing and all-knowing divine entity—maybe I’d be broken off a slice of something sweet.

I know of no good fortune that I haven’t had to chase. The bad fortunes are going to show up whenever they want, whether you invite them or not.

The ones who suffer so mightily that their blessings must be confirmed in the most concrete and touchable ways. Believe me, it gets less funny the more time you spend thinking about it.

Yes, only God can judge me, but then, what to make of the judges?

If I will play the game and submit myself to a nefarious binary, I will say that I have been good. I have never been innocent, but I have tried to be good.

It is good to survive, after all, if one is to be sentenced to living.

All I know is a door closed once, and even when it opened, there wasn’t enough light to find my way out of the room that consumed me. Forgive me for committing to suffering. I thought it might be the answer. That if I suffered loudly enough, for long enough, I would be owed something from somewhere holy. And isn...

With enough repetition anything can become a religion it doesn’t matter if it works or not it simply matters with enough repetition anything can become a religion it doesn’t matter if it works with enough repetition anything can become

Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary colors to activate it. Longing is an activator. Loneliness and heartbreak are not the same.

Migration is sometimes a requirement, an act of survival.

misery doesn’t need company as much as I believe that misery is company. Damn good company too, if you can get it honest enough.

Someone who is beholden to a place. Who loves that place, who wants to be in the place. And still, it just can’t work. It has less to do with wanting to explore or take risks. It’s not even a firm rejection of the place itself. It’s the circumstances, which have become so unbearable that it serves someone to leave even their most familiar comforts behind.

return would be all it would take for him to be forgiven.

But it’s the planes you’ve got to worry about. If someone in a song is leaving on a plane, they aren’t coming back. You will ache until the ache becomes so familiar, you forget to feel it at all.

only way that makes sense to me: love as a feather that just hasn’t found the wind to carry it away yet.

songs like this aren’t really ever about anything but ego, and the panic that sets in when ego is ruptured. These songs are structured almost entirely in opposition to the fear of being alone. Yes, there is a specific person who might fill a void, but I don’t want to deal with the seeking.

I know what it is to leave in hopes that whatever has failed me isn’t a part of my own internal makeup, that it is a place dragging me down, beckoning me toward all my worst impulses.

He once told me that he’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t a bad person, I was just a bad decision-maker. When I perked up a bit at this, thankful for the affirmation, he responded, “No, you don’t understand. That’s actually more concerning.”

told myself that by September I’d be gone. Somewhere else. I’d leave behind the town I loved because I wasn’t convinced the town loved me back anymore. It isn’t me, I’d tell myself. It’s this place. I never had a chance.

An obsession with suffering on the path to triumph is not uniquely American but does manifest itself in uniquely American ways. It’s the lie we’re told about what success truly “counts” and what doesn’t. This, too, prioritizes a type of staying. Fighting it out where you are until where you are is the place you win, and in doing so, you endear a place to you, eternally, without interruption.

But they were in complete control over when and how their own heartbreak arrived.

is out there, beyond this place we have loved each other, is too uncertain to trust. Even if you’re bored or unhappy. Even if we don’t dream in the same language anymore. We’re familiar to each other, and that depth of knowing is an intimacy that can cover at least some of the sins that might otherwise tear us apart, isn’t it?

And what other outcome could there be, then, but a person giving in? This is what fools like me have been made to believe, what the movies say, what the romantics say. And so I believe that on the other side of this robust suffering, there must be a bouquet of years better than whatever years led two people to a near-demise.

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. I do dirt here because I know exactly where the dirt can be done, I know the shelter I can run toward when the dark city bathes in a silent siren’s rotating lights. When I am lovesick here, I know where there is a bar with a jukebox. A place where one quarter gets you four whole songs and no one asks why you’re alone, because they’re alone too. There are few things more intimate than the history made when a person touches a place, runs a hand along it for decades at a time.

The long way home is still a way home.

damage will do and it is seductive to watch some shit go up in flames, even though the burning won’t bring back anything any of us miss or love. But that ain’t the point. I get why the jerseys burned in Cleveland, I get why the men gathered around and sacrificed their once-beloved garments. How quickly can we get past the part where we feel everything and cross the other threshold, gasping and numb.

It’s that the belief is already there, already planted and waiting to be ignited by seeing, and the seeing could be anything. One missed shot or one forgotten returned phone call or one kiss that didn’t feel like the others. Yes, I have been sad and have convinced myself of anything and everything.

say I want a championship and mean I am looking for a light so consuming that it overwhelms all absence.

And there is no language I have, even now, for what happens to the eyes of someone you love in a moment when they are both ashamed of you and afraid for you all at once. There is something lost there, an incalculable loss. Something beyond the myth of innocence. The imagination fractures in the fraction of a moment like this. Someone believed that, no matter how bad you fucked up, there was always going to be a place they could pull you back from, or pull you back toward.

We both knew what I was capable of surviving and for exactly how long I was capable of surviving it. We were both ashamed, too, though our shames were different children, nurtured by different parents.

It is hard, in that moment, bending into a person you love, knowing you will never be who you once were in their mind.

Don’t try to scale the mountain of your shame all at once. Maybe no one will forgive you, but you’re still alive and so someone has.

It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave.

I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.

we must figure out, together, what we are willing to lie about for the sake of a clean memory.

What I remember is that it felt like nothing could ever harm me. That nothing here had ever harmed anyone. I am not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means that at the right hour, I am everyone’s fool.

It is easy to feel like you own a city in this moment, but the city still owns you. And this is how the story ends. I believed a city invincible, and so I believed myself invincible in it. I believed my people to be invincible. I believed there would be no evil to befall anyone I loved within this city’s borders, because I believed there would be no evil, not anymore.

I first heard “California Dreamin’ ” before I knew where California was. When I barely knew what it looked like on a map. But I wanted to go there. It’s a vicious trick.

It is romantic to be cursed, to feel like the world has it out for just you. That there is a deity bored enough to disrupt your ecstasy. We had a good run, but it’s not like any of us know what we’d do with a sky turned to gold.

The history of an underdog can be distilled down to their brightest moment and then held on to forever.

It is an immense feeling. I tell myself it must be temporary. There are times when some of us must have a shorter memory than what our bodies hold.