I think the best part of this song is that fundamentally as a narrative, it doesn’t really work. It gives you an impossible situation, right? It gives you the conflict or the issue up front, right? Then the second verse talks about when I was by myself experiencing all of these gifts and blessings and things that were coming into me that made me feel like I should be whole, but I still wasn’t. So it’s two versus of conflict, and then the third verse kind of never really tells you how I got to that point. It’s just like, we’ve reached the finish line. And I think the best part about it is that it doesn’t really make sense. It wasn’t just like I had the realization, yes, it’s good and then Kirsten, or maybe it is that, but there’s not like anything beyond a divine reasoning why it worked out.

When my girl left me, I didn’t really have a choice in anything. You know what I mean? Like it wasn’t like I could convince her anything different, and I was also trying to convince myself that that was the route that I was supposed to be taking. Most rappers don’t get married at that young, or ever have a kid with somebody and then later marry them. Like they usually, if they’re good dads, they figure that out and they also like move on and figure it out later themselves. And so I had a lot of times where I was convincing myself that it was nothing I could do to repair it. And you know, “A new coat of paint don’t make the stain go away,” is kind of like a point when I was convincing myself like, you could do all that. Like you know, getting saved, and practicing celibacy on your own, separate from your girl. Like, it was just like, “She’s going to do her thing, she left you, it’s over. You know what I’m saying? And all this stuff that you’re trying to do to purify yourself is for naught, so quit it.” And all that was to say like, “Shut up, self.” Like, he go high.

Shout out DeSean Jackson, shout out the Eagles. They got my boy back. So first of all, got to throw out a little wordplay. But also it was, in essence, it’s just about the duality of self. Like when you pray, when you pray for real, you got to get on your knees. You got to say that stuff out loud. You got to take time to yourself. Like, there’s always prayer before breakfast and dinner and “Oh yeah, I’m a pray for you,” that kind of stuff. But when you feel it, and you’re at your lowest and you really go out and you really in a room speaking in an empty room, and you feel like that’s the only way that’s going to get you out of there, there’s still always going to be a part on the inside of yourself that’s doubting. And so I had to deal with my mind being like, “Oh you going to pray over this too?” Like, “This is your go-to when things get hard?” And I’m glad that that voice didn’t overpower how I felt.

I got a big ass hand. My hands have been the same size since I was like seven years old. They’d used to drag behind me. So that’s just been a thing. But it’s also like, I think it was to really illustrate when men think about getting married, they think about really getting locked down. I think even more so than women do. They think about the end of something, rather than the beginning of something. And I think at that time I was just like, “I need like five or six years to like figure things out and then we’ll get married.” Like, that’s how I would talk about it to her. And I think I just had this mindset that it was like, “Because my life is big because I feel like I’m larger than life, it’s going to take a lot to lock me down,” and it’s not a Pringles can, but there is a lot of Vivi’s in there. They’re doing a big dance right now. It’s a little joint on there.

That’s about the fall from grace. It’s about that feeling of like, you become a giant, but the bigger you get, the faster you fall. And I was in a position where I had built up all this feeling around me of like fixing everything and being perfect, and I was living in probably the most imperfect space that I had ever occupied.

I feel like when we were initially together right after the baby came, I wasn’t living right. Like you get to a certain degree of success, and you start to believe that all these different things are owed to you. So I wasn’t faithful. I wasn’t kind. I wasn’t understanding. I wasn’t helpful in a lot of ways. I just wasn’t all the way there. And so when I talk about every room had an elephant, it’s saying not even just on the sex side, but just like every level of the relationship, there’s an elephant in the room that’s not being addressed. That’s where that saying comes from. That we got to address the elephant in the room, because it’s like we’re sitting here acting like nothing’s going wrong. And then I go on to say, “Trying to find her shoes, rummagin' through the skeletons.” It’s like there’s so many skeletons in my closet that it’s like she can’t do a regular everyday thing without coming across something that I did wrong, something that I’m trying to hide, and yeah, she took away sex. Took me out of my element. I didn’t know how to act after that.

My girl was a real estate agent. I gave Kanye that line once. “She in school to be a real estate agent.” My girl was a real state agent. She’s a model and she was a waitress at this spot called the Pump Room at the time. She was getting money. She had some cash. She had a car, she had a crib. She was doing decent. Basically, she was putting forward more effort for herself to grow, us as a unit to grow, and me, by myself to grow than I was.

I went through my own selfishness with the child support thing, her friends, her traveling with me. All types of shit that were insecurities of my own about how much I was worth to her outside of what successes I’ve had in this worldly business. And I had to really use this song to really tell myself about myself. To understand that there is more important piece that was missing for so long. And it was the ring. It was a godly marriage and some godly sex and some godly arguments and some godly having it be based it something real rather than it being based off some title that we switch on and off.

Biggest lie that I’ve ever told my girl is probably that I couldn’t be with her. That I wasn’t ready to love her. That I didn’t love her. Something crazy like that. There’s plenty of lies. I’m very far from a perfect person. Probably one of the times that I tried to give up and be like, “Look man, I’m just gonna go date a celebrity bitch.” That’s the thing, you get in this industry they’ll convince you of anything. That you need all types of shit that you don’t need. I’m glad that I could live a real life rather than a sensationalized life.