Let Love Have the Last Word - Common Page 0,1
I loved to do and would have done no matter the cost.
That I’ve since received more money for rapping speaks to perseverance, I suppose, or market forces. Rapping is my release, my art, my way of expression. It’s a desire that comes from my spirit, and whenever I can appease the desire to rap, I do. And if I can’t do it in a studio, then I’ll go for a drive, alone, and do it there, happily and at peace.
The fitting went on for a little while longer. I tried on a couple more outfits, made my choices, which Micaela approved with a thumbs-up from the laptop, and said my goodbyes and thanks to the staff as Aun and I departed. After trying on the fresh clothes, I felt dressed down when I was back in my T-shirt and basketball shorts, my usual outfit when I work out at the gym with my trainer; I often get along with him, but at the time, he and I were having a slight disagreement. It was about politics, something involving the president, barely six months into his first term, who had everyone on edge, it seemed, prepared for disaster. After Barack Obama, the world felt uncertain and unstable, unpredictable, and dark.
When Aun and I stepped outside, the Southern California heat assaulted us. “Damn,” I said, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand. Aun and I were walking down the sidewalk, hardly a few yards from my stylist’s building, when someone shouted me out. “Are you Common?”
I didn’t even see him until he said my name, a slim white dude wearing shorts and a red shirt; the shirt matched his Nike trainers, and the hatchback he pointed to when he said, “I was just parking my car and I saw you step out and I was like, ‘Yo, is that Common?’ Your music changed my life, and it blessed my life, too.” He told me his name, and I shook his hand. He said he was a yoga teacher, and a personal trainer. “I trained Kobe,” he said. I had no idea if that was true or if he was just running a hustle; in either case, he gave me his business card. “I’d love to train with you,” he said. I said, “Cool,” then thanked him for the card as I climbed into my truck, started the ignition, and peeled out. I started the day staring at myself in the mirror; likewise, this memoir is a reflection of me as I examine myself and consider love from its beautiful dimensions.
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
—Zora Neale Hurston
* * *
My name is Rashid, and I do not necessarily know more about love than you do. The emotion feels elusive, as well as the knowledge, the understanding—the meaning, in other words. Why do I love? Why do I bother? I suppose, in thinking about it, there is something human in the desire to love and to be loved; those things are treated as separate desires, wants, but maybe they are the same coin. It is love, on both sides—you and I, he and she, they and them—that adds dimensions to the emotion. It reflects from all angles the various temperatures and viewpoints of love, and no matter how one might feel in the moment, and this I can relate to personally, there is no one true story.
In the midst of a new breakup, or some years after a past one, there is, I think, a habit to reconsider all that happened between two people, to see if your role in it was as bad as you really perceive it, in the hopes of perhaps forgiving yourself. This doesn’t mean you necessarily did anything wrong or hurtful to the other person. On the contrary, sometimes relationships simply end, without blame, without guilty parties. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, in the end, there is always someone who is at fault. Is that me? Was that the case when such-and-such relationship with so-and-so deteriorated after so many hopes, visions, fantasies, of a shared life?
If it was me, if I am in fact guilty, then I have to ask myself the questions, here and now, from that single point in my mind, that one rotating planet in space, my world. Here, I am now in my midforties, and I am experiencing, comparatively speaking, a more successful life than before.
To be recognized for my art, to have been in the game, so to