Take Care - Drake
“I know you’ve been hurt by someone else. I can tell by the way you carry yourself.”
Some part of me much larger than I’d imagined related to this song and this album this past year. Maybe turning 29 or 30 made me realize my own mortality. Maybe my aunt pointing her 9mm Smith and Wesson at my head on Christmas Day, or my dad getting arrested on felony charges of selling 32 marijuana plants made me realize how much I was fighting against. Or maybe my relationship to this album and this feeling started before then, when I realized I’d been shying away from dating for a very long time and decided to put myself back out there. I don’t know.
But I feel it, this something, and trying to write about it is a bit like trying to write about section 50 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Section 50 starts with “There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.” How do you write about what’s in you when you don’t know what it is but you only know it hurts?
I know we all have baggage (Drake sing-raps, “When you’re ready, just say you’re ready—when all the baggage just ain’t so heavy”), but I never realized I had so much until the past couple of years. I must’ve known in some part of me that my childhood wasn’t happy; my father supposedly moved out several times and I only remember it once. My mother brought me to meet my half-sister’s mother when I was eight and my half-sister’s mother was six-months pregnant, and I don’t remember it; my parents stayed married for ten years after that. And it goes deeper than that: one time, my father’s friend asked me how I felt about my grandmother in front of her, and I said, “She’s crazy!” I meant it in an seven-year-old I-love-you way, or maybe I said it because I was repeating my father’s words. But I certainly never meant to hurt my grandmother. When I called to apologize to my grandmother that night, she said, “I’m not going to forgive you.” I cried so much after that, realizing I’d hurt my grandmother and she’d never forgive me, but somewhere in the last couple of years I realized how fucked up it is that my grandmother couldn’t forgive my seven-year-old words. There’s so much hurt in my family, so many secrets, but all throughout my childhood, I tried to adopt a bubbly blonde personality. I didn’t know any other way of dealing with my family, or even know how to tell anyone about them.
I carried that bubbly blonde personality with me until I hit my mid-twenties or so, and my father shit all over my twenty-third birthday and I started going to therapy. I finally stopped referring to my father as the greatest man on earth, though I still remember now how and why I felt that way. When I was four, I was so attached to my father that I wouldn’t let him put a new roof on our house without me; he had to tie me to the chimney so I wouldn’t fall off. My father said he wanted to be my role model for how husbands and fathers should act, and I wanted desperately to believe him, even when I knew who he really was. For a long time, I blamed my father’s mistresses instead of my father. I wanted him to be good. I wanted to be good.
I don’t know what I’m saying with all of this except that I like Drake’s album. I like how sad it is. When he sings in “Marvin’s Room,” “I’ve had sex four times this week,” I guess he’s bragging, but he’s also really lonely. I get it. I’ve been doing some of the same, too, lately; I’m trying to fill some hole in me with physical intimacy. I’ve been trying to forget how sad it is to be an adult and to realize that the family I’d always hoped for will never be sane and healthy, and I’ll never be supported completely. I don’t know how to fill that hole; I don’t know how to stop grieving.
And I didn’t even know, really, how apparent this shift in me was until one of my students this past semester said, “Something’s happened to you; you’ve been through something.” This was after we finished reading The Sun Also Rises and most of my students wanted Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley to end up together for no other reason than they wanted a happy ending. Despite the fact that I know they are still young and romantic and most of them have never had their hearts broken, I couldn’t stop myself from telling them they’d been watching too many romantic comedies.
Because, really, romantic comedies don’t come true—at least, not for me. The guy doesn’t cross over to your side of the platform to say, “I like you a lot” and especially, “I love you.” He doesn’t meet you in the airport to say, “Don’t go.” Instead, you’ll find yourself staring across a metro platform in D.C., wishing desperately that you had the courage to say how you feel and to figure out how he feels, until his train comes first and you watch it until it goes out of sight and you cry silently on the way back to your hotel on your last night. And after that, you’ll break up with romantic comedies.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I understand this album. Take Care. At 30 years old, I think I understand Drake’s sadness, whether it’s genuine or not.
