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There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib

There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib

by Parker · 44 things on Twos

On basketball and ascension
“Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weights your down.” - Toni Morrison
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.
Rarely are these motions talked about as the motions of love, and since we are talking about our loves over our enemies, lord knows I will take whatever I can to be in the presence of my people. To have a secret that is just ours, played out through some quiet and invented choreography. A touch between us that lingers just long enough to know we've put some work into our love for each other. We've made something that no one outside can get through. I do not waste time or language on our enemies, be-loveds. 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.
Yes, this is what you have now. Yes, the future has its arms open, waiting for you to run.
Find the point where you are unkillable and jump towards it if you can.
Kufi
Not today, the world is too much.
It grows back, after all. That's the miracle of hair. It allows us our mistakes and still returns to us, potentially ready to endure more.
I knew what it was like to keep something close, just in case there was some error in the universe. The people we love deserve to return to the places they left with the things they love intact.
The two of us, laughing and crying ourselves to sleep, wondering if there would ever be a time when we might find ourselves unleashed from the kingdom of vanity.
I am sorry for what has been passed down to me without my knowing, what has just shown up on the doorstep and found its way in.
At first it was jarring. Something I believed was happening to me. Even though the grays have not yet overrun my head and beard, I still found myself wondering how to remove them, pick them out one by one, even against the advice of my beloved barber at the time, who was an old black man with a head covered in gray, who I went to because he cherished the hair on his head, and you must find a barber who cherishes the hair on their own head slowly, thoughtfully, and carefully, so that they might (if you are lucky) extend that kindness toward yours. And this barber told me never to pull the gray weeds from the dark garden, for they might simply grow back with a new found ferocity. An anger at their removal, he told me. You don't want to make an enemy out of the grays, he told me one day, while lining me up. Best to just thank them for showin' up to the party. Lucky you got a party for them to show up to.
When the judge sentenced Brandon, with not a single line yet woven into his furrowed, boyish brow, to thirty years in a cage and his mother whispered He'll be so old when he gets out, I know what was unspoken on the other side of that was And what will become of me in the meantime?
Yes, Lord, I come to you today pleading for all of the aches of age, all of the permanent and immovable damage you have to offer. Yes, there are moments I have spent and will continue to spend in a mirror, massaging products onto my skin and slowly washing them off, if not to delay the very things I am now welcoming, at least to make them as luminous as possible. Do not be fooled by the weapons I refuse to lay down. I come to you today with gratitude in knowing the fight cannot be won. Let the hair turn its drab colors and, perhaps, slowly begin to depart down the drain. Let the pain in the knee linger as a reminder that movement might one day come with a price, if I am lucky enough to make it that long. 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.
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. But if I am alive for it, I hope that it takes me out early. I do not wish to be alive in the aftermath of the world ending. The movies and television shows don't make it look ap-pealing, what with all of the scavenging and the hard surfaces and the need to be proficient with multiple forms of weaponry and alert at all times. Survival, sure, but when the world suggests it may be done with us, I have no interest in pouring myself into rebuilding it.
But one thing I would crave is the silence. The emptiness of it all. In the spring of 2020, when I thought the world was doing a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse, the only thing that comforted me was the silence. Knowing that the city would otherwise be flooded with shouts and sounds and yet was forced to restrain itself was strangely calming for me.
"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 who loves you.
There was always the understanding that the younger sibling was the real talent.
There is power in withholding. I’m not offering the parts pf yourself that people are most eager to see.
To stunt is also to know what you have, which is also to know what everyone else doesn't have, which is also to know what can be lost. What can be taken. I don't know how someone decides what they'll kill for, or what they'll spend years locked up in the name of.
Anything that can be taken, will be taken.
I have known elders who tell us young folks to pray only for the important things. Don't waste God's time with no nonsense. God is busy, after all.
Find a new route when the alleyway sprouts more shadows than you want to answer for, which is any shadow beyond your own if you let me tell it.
What good is a witness in a county obsessed with forgetting?
Believe what your eyes are telling you is real.
A silent witness is no good to us.
There is a way to blend into the architecture of a place, as long as you don't summon any chaos while you do it.
The greatest engine within the machinery of deception is mercy. The mercy visited upon you by those who know something is amiss but don't say shit.
With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn't matter if it works or not, it simply matters that a person returns.
With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn't matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.
silence in the bar until it happened. Even the crowd at the draft lottery didn't make a sound until it happened. These are the true believers, it seems. 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.
“What is this beautiful freedom we long for, then promptly grow bored within?” - Rita Dove
So much longing is steeped in absurdity
One must become content with shedding a version of oneself that one might only vaguely remember but not be able to touch again.
My Girl by Otis Redding
Love is a feather that just hasn’t found the wind to carry it away yet.
I’ll keep it in case he comes back one day.
There is no gospel riches than the gospel of suffering of living through Large stretches devold of pleasure for the sake of reaching some place beyond your curent circumstances and feeling as though you have truly earned a right to be there. I have sen nough and I prefer the path of least resistance.
The excitement that opens a season, when there are no wins or losses in anyone's columns, and the excitement that fades as a record becomes weighed down with L's, but with that weight comes a new hope: There's always next year. This moment is lost, but soon there will be another season, another blank slate. Possibility awaits. If you can believe in it long enough, destiny rotates, tilts its wild and colorful feathers toward everyone eventually.
It is easiest to measure the distance between where I am and where I want to be in miles, in minutes. It is unfair to measure such distance in heartbreak, in loneliness. In how long it takes to stop staring at a photo of old friends, the absence that you might occupy around a table. Distance doesn't lie, even if time does.
But that's the thing: you aren't supposed to look behind you if what's in front of you is already good. Even if you think, for a moment, that some part of whatever is behind you might be better. Do not tamper with the engine of the heart, rusted as it is but still running. It knows what it knows, it hums well enough to have carried you to this morning, and with luck, it might carry you to another one.
Don’t let a motherfucker see you sweat, even for a little bit.