“Love Lockdown” — Kanye West

Miami, Florida

October 2008

I have admittedly been on break for the past 2 months and sustained a prolonged flirtation with a scene that is so vividly tangible in my mind that I can recall its scent as a travel-sized Burberry London. The colors are golden and canary and have the ability to evoke motion like a New Years Eve photograph of Leigh Lezark at Crobar. The main character has depth and dimension and her evaluation of the present moment is convoluted and heavily influenced by the Sailor-girl Halloween costume on the floor of his bedroom and the stash of X hidden beneath his dresser drawer. Her captor is less penetrating and regardless of his Beverly Hills upbringing, is meandering on the side of Neanderthal. His scent is of distilled XY chromosome and his regard for her has the lifespan equivalent to that of a suicidal fruit-fly. Yet, she is enthralled by him and his omission of her presence beside him in bed only pyramids her yearning. Every sense is heightened and for the moment, our main character believes she can measure the distance between his eyelashes. He is the bird of prey and she is flaunting her flesh, eager for his talons to pierce and destroy. His eyes are red and blazing with a Darwinist theory of evolution and his philosophy tears threads off her Lilith blanket.

She wants to wake him up so they can spend the morning scouring each others neighborhoods on Google Earth. She wants to watch videos of teacup poodles on YouTube until he is forced to atone with videos of vicious French police dogs. She wants to go to his local bookstore so he can return her Chai because it’s not hot enough. She wants his hands to massage her scalp while his feet vine around hers beneath the heavy sheets. More than anything, she wants there to be something real. She wants to see brief moments of the genuine between his moments of annihilation. But our main character is masked with her own delusion. She is only seeing what she has created — in essence, she is sending flowers to herself. She turns left when the girl he really wants, is on the right. She doesn’t hear how the ellipses pound like an 808 when he says things like “Was that a bad idea? I mean, you’re a great girl but…” She believes his calls to her, months later, are because he misses her and not because he wants a threesome with her best friend in an Upper East Side loft. She will continue to believe that one day he will text her again asking whether she got home safely, even if he is not in the same time zone and unable to use his Blackberry to locate her bed.

And this delusion, this mirage of an oasis in the desert, is what keeps her from hearing the sound beside her pillow. The vibrating that has kept him awake half the night. The 16 missed phone calls from the people who want to send her flowers and ask whether she got home safely last night. Instead, she will wait until he is awake so he can scavenge his roommate’s bathroom for a condom and walk her sorry Sailor-girl ass to the car so she can drive home and resolve to stop wearing Burberry London and sleep with the daughter synonym of “Dignity.”