Whirlwind

19

[Lamarr]

"I can tell you one thing you're lying about. You're lying about who you are to yourself."

"Everything you do and have done since the day you decided to trade in your real self for this fake ass lifestyle has created someone I don't want to be bothered with and I shouldn't have to..."

"You're going to be a fiancé to Melanie, be the artist I'm writing about so I can earn my big ass check from XXL and hopefully one day you'll be Lamarr Cole in every other part of your life. The real Lamarr Cole."

The real Lamarr Cole.

The longer I sat in the same spot of this frigid marble floor, with the pages of my notebook collecting nothing more than scratch outs from my pen, the more I began wondering who that was anymore. It seemed like with every gesture to try and figure it out I was falling short. This conflict was doing nothing but frustrating me and making the words Riley spoke from her lips the other day, along with the instrumentals from my Beats sharper and more powerful. They were both clashing together and penetrating my ears, making me slowly lose my sanity.

Never had this kind of question of who am I? Who is Lamarr been something so troubling for a me to answer. Maybe cause at some point I stopped responding to it with honesty. So I couldn't possibly try, just this once, to compile a response that lived up to the realness and seriousness of the question. That just wasn't something I believed I was capable of doing anymore.

I was far from the guy who left Fayetteville to chase an almost unattainable dream. He had an innocence to him. Naïve and completely oblivious to life outside a small town, but was brave enough to leave home and take a chance. He ain't know nobody in New York but that didn't stop him, and once he made it by the grace of a higher power, he never looked back.

Maybe that was my biggest flaw and one of the main reasons I am the unrecognizable ass man that I am today. All because I forgot to look back. I was so busy looking forward and morphing into what I swore I'd never be that I didn't have time to stop before I got ahead of myself. I didn't give myself a chance to save myself. My biggest fault could've also been the fact that I knew how to lie better than anything else. What started off as a method to get me out of minor shit turned into my lifeline. On top of that, there were a slew of other things I could name and probably more others could name that were all parts of this new me.

What was even more fucked up was I know that I've changed for the worse. I knew I had made a U-turn down the wrong path, but I didn't know where to even start to try to reverse and go back to my old ways. Who knew your old ways could be better? 

Aside from that, I could tell folks this same shit running through my mind a many of times, but no one would believe that I was lost. No one would believe I was struggling every single second to get it all together. I was so counterfeit that even my truth seemed like lies to the people closest to me, and just like them I was beginning to believe I was a lost cause.

"Knock out of it, Cole. Write nigga, fuck this other shit and write." I tried to force those muffled demands coming from my mouth into my head, but none of it was sticking. My focus was somewhere far from my art and the lyrics I so badly wanted to create. It was crazy how Riley's impact got me back into writing and had the clout to drag me right out of it.

"Come on Cole...write." I grumbled with the stroke of my pen. Only two lines bled through the sheet before I snatched it from the spiral and tossed it aside with the rest of the paper balls surrounding me.

"Fuck this shit."

I was done trying today, maybe tomorrow I'd have my head cleared. If not, then this album and everything depending on it could be forgotten cause I was giving it all up at this point. The only thing I was sure would give me drive to just get up from this floor was the comfort of some Hennessy. I was lucky if there was even a bottle still here since I stayed drinking it and Mel liked pouring it down the toilet when she got a hold of it.