Last night I used a YouTube-to-MP3 converter to download Childish Gambino's fifth mixtape, "Culdesac." It was something out of my teenage years—like I was sat in my room again repeating the steps to add those same IDs to my old Macbook. It was all ethical, as it never hit Spotify, and I wondered if that was because, while it was some of his seminal work, it bore no resemblance to the persona he'd already begun maturing into when the streaming age commenced. That conjecture feels pertinent on the heels of his announcement that he's dropping his moniker altogether because it's grown unfulfilling. Good for him.
I worked through the tracks, recited the lyrics quietly, and felt all but transported back to the days when I kept them in constant circulation. I thought about the boy who put them in my head in the first place. I imagined him—a man now—sleeping soundly in the same borough as me, lying in a bed I couldn't picture with a woman I could (as a result of some light research into his more recent ongoings) whom he'd probably marry soon, having not the faintest whisper of a dream about me. Good for him.
It started when I was a sophomore in high school. Following a rocky first year, academically and emotionally speaking, I was brand new that fall. Eyes had just begun to draw to me since I'd emerged as an athletic talent of sorts, but I wasn't yet sure of just who was watching. This felt like ascension, but I didn't want to say it.
It happened in journalism class, where I met Z after a spring sports season of riding the bus that both varsity baseball and softball teams took to away games. I knew who he was back then, and I'd later come to find out that he knew of me too—more so than I knew at the time—but that room was where the spark originated. We said we'd thank our teacher at the wedding.
I remember the feeling that he'd come on too strong, but upon reflection, I was probably just a frantic girl who'd never been seriously pursued by someone older. Come December, I wasn't too scared to hop into his car routinely, despite the restrictions of his junior license that prohibited such rides. I also remember the pit in my stomach when my dad told me he'd clocked us pulling into my driveway one day that month when I thought he wasn't home.
He was just short of stern in his words when he said it was a breach of rules, but he'd seen the kid at basketball games, and he was a solid player who seemed like a stand-up guy, so he approved. I rolled my eyes at this nonsequitur that was so him of him, but I was giddy—sickly happy. It was really happening.
This was when I learned how hard I fall. It didn't take long before I was cheering him on from the stands and meeting him during free periods. While blithe to the consideration that I was playing into the same trope to which I'd seen my friends succumb the year prior, I was blissfully unaware of the roots he'd put down. I was unaware that he'd just become the precedent for and keeper of the pronoun "you" in my musings—not to be bestowed upon another for dozens more seasons.
I have this tepid theory (that I conceive as I write now) that this transition from "him" to "you" is a marker of a grander and acutely powerful transition. One does not overtake the other until the subject overtakes the self. Somehow, somewhere in the thick of it, it seems, I became him. His loves, his hates, his views and takes—I absorbed them like sustenance. Loving and admiring him wasn't enough. I was too intrinsically malleable to stop there. In a much more figurative sense, "me" and "you" had melded. So there we were.
If anything, it didn't feel like I was becoming anyone but myself. Perhaps I was becoming me with his help. I was constructed in his image—one which I was proud to don and determined to protect. Despite what I couldn't acknowledge, I was silently defending my right to it. That image was everything, and I'd uphold it fervently, no matter what happened behind closed doors.
First loves are worth shouting about from the mountaintops. I was lucky to be able and comfortable enough to do so, but that comes with certain territory because then the world is listening. It was just after Christmas during my junior year and his freshman at our state school when the months of shoddy communication culminated in a breakup so gutwrenching that I literally threw up in front of him when it happened. It was nothing he hadn't seen before—at that one house party before he drove me home, shoeless in his sweatshirt, rambling numbers that were surely not the digits in my phone passcode when all I needed to do was notify my parents that I was running past curfew, in particular. It was still more embarrassing.
While I couldn't keep it to myself for long, the details were sparsely shared—the impact even less so. Few saw me sweat, both in terms of the expression and my perspiration when I tried to hold a meal down the following day. The embarrassment was tenfold as, by then, I'd come to an understanding of how much of me had been borne of him. The pain of that realization became another critical secret, the likes of which I'd have to defend in a new way because, in my head, I was defending myself from my subscribed predilections. This was war.
But it was too late. I wanted to watch Portlandia and avoid chain restaurants and bash Greek life and travel to Europe and make NCAA brackets and listen to Childish Gambino on a loop. I wanted to be opinionated but unproblematic and fun but composed and confident enough to believe that I could make my goals achievements. And so, for better, for worse, or anything in between, he never left me.
He never left me completely—for a while, not even in a physical sense. So it felt like we were together when our families met up in Santorini and we spent three days in a surrealist time warp, exploring beaches I thought maybe we'd see again someday. It felt like we were together those early years of college when I'd sleep at his apartment three times a week, hoping he'd profess that he'd changed his mind about what we could be but watching him say a prolonged goodbye nonetheless.
I remember, today with indifference, that one night he got blackout drunk and told me he loved me again in our sober ride home. I stoked those coals for another year until his final farewell, before he shipped off to Seattle post-grad. This was where he'd live for the next few years before returning to his birthplace—New York City—no longer the "you" but still a part of me forever and just five miles away.
Blame that foundational knowledge of his whereabouts on my father, please. His bumping into Z's mother at the CVS in our hometown has nothing to do with me. And I didn't need to hear about it midday in the office through an unprompted phone call, but I answered, and that was the information I received.
There's no undoing what was done. There's no peeling off the layers of his that I adhered to me because they're so far below the surface now that it would be mutilation to extract them. Today I am not him, but I am because of him. And for better, for worse, or anything in between, I accept and honor that.
Weeks ago, here in Brooklyn, I was at a man's apartment whom I'd been seeing casually. Several drinks in, it came to my attention that there was a "Camp" vinyl on the premises, so I asked him to play it. He did. I rapped the whole record, A and B sides, while he watched and listened. I don't think I told him why I knew every song, every word, in the first place because it didn't matter. It was my memory, and so would be this one.
After I ended it with him, I took that bit and ran with it. I pawned it off as a Raya bio. "Should you sit idly by while I rap Childish Gambino's debut album front to back..." I'd consider it an inside joke with myself, but I guess you're in on it now. While this layer of me is from Z, it became mine, then I showed it to someone else, and then I showed it to everyone. It doesn't matter where it came from or where it goes because, at the end of the day, it's still mine.
Donald Glover (FKA Childish Gambino) ends "Camp" with a particularly resonant message when he recites the outro monologue of the last track. I'd feel remiss not to mention that Z recorded his prom proposal to me over the instrumental of said outro. His parallel was one drawn between ours and the tale of a summer crush, but I have something different in mind when I hear it today. I oscillate between both interpretations, actually, but that's not the point.
"Make it all for everybody, always," Donald says after he describes the dissemination of this private confession of love to the girl from camp. Sharing your truth may seem like doing yourself a disservice at first—airing expressions that could live not to see the light of day, and life would go on just the same, you think. It wouldn't, though. The same goes for the admissions you refuse to make to yourself about yourself, and what you do with them.
Recently I read that vulnerability is the greatest form of bravery. I don't know if I agree with that, but I'm trying hard to be brave and believe it. So I'm committed to this path of truth and vulnerability, whatever that means. I am here, baring my soul, asking nothing in return. I'm all but using the names. "Everybody can't turn around and tell everybody, everybody already knows, I told them." I've grown tired of not telling you, so now you know.
