Singularly Limitless

17 Feb, 2025

I am very slowly making my way through Hanif Abdurraqib's beautiful prose-poetry work There's Always This Year with M. Early in the book Hanif uses the phrase "singularly limitless" to describe the way that the young black fans of a local underdog basketball team felt in the outfits and energy they put on for the games. ¹ That phrase has stuck somewhere deep in me.

"Singularly Limitless" is about grasping for moments of freedom: a theme There's Always This Year talks about over and over again. The energy, the outfits, the sport. I see it again in United Skates a documentary about the role of roller skating in black American life. Bodies move across the rink, dancing, moving, flying. Briefly becoming limitless. I nearly jumped off the couch watching the way the skaters in that movie moved. Something deep inside of me yearns to launch towards that full-bodied freedom. I, also, want to fly.

Both this book and this movie are concerned with black culture in the US, and the ways that bodies find ways to express themselves despite their oppressive conditions. There's so much there that I can't really speak to as a white person. What I can say is: no one is free until we're all free, and ooh does it feel good when we can taste real, true freedom. So good, in fact, that I think about it all the time, moments where I've felt "singularly limitless."

I got on a pair of rollerskates for the first time in years today and as I glided across the floor I felt it: the feeling of flying. The taste of being limitless. My whole body was there, surrounded by so many other bodies, dancing and slipping and skidding and floating.

It took me most of my life to find my way into my body, and now that I'm here, I wont give up this freedom lightly. These moments remind me of what's waiting there when we're free. When we're dancing together, flying together, eating together, praying and crying together. When we're all together, limitless.