Where Were You When Frank Ocean Returned?

Sean Enfield

“When summer comes round again.” – Frank Ocean on when his next album would come out, October 15, 2013

I spent the summer of 2016 waiting. I had just finished my first-year teaching and now waited on the second. All the while, I taught summer school. I taught for a Muslim prep school near Dallas, Texas, during a contentious election year, in which Muslims featured prominently in the heated, vitriolic campaigning. Every day, I waited to see what the profanely racist then-candidate Trump said about Muslim refugees, and how I might respond to his comments should my students ask—or, rather, when my students asked. I was brown too, a black man in his early twenties, though not Muslim, and our identities became major talking points in the first post-Obama election. This waiting took a toll, and so I booked a flight to Seattle, leaving me waiting for my first vacation since grade school. All in all, I waited to arrive at something like ‘making it,’ some sign from God, Himself, that said, Job well done, son.

More importantly, however, I waited on Frank Ocean’s sophomore album. With the stress of my first year teaching behind me, Frank’s new release was that God-ordained reward for surviving the return to middle school—second puberty, I’ve dubbed it—though the album hadn’t actually materialized and the waiting proved sluggish. Still, I needed Frank. His music was a Fortress of Solitude, and he the gay black R&B Superman that resided within.

In 2016, his return seemed imminent, though by then we had been waiting four years since his first studio release, channel ORANGE. The anticipation started July of that year when Frank’s dormant website, boysdontcry.co, was updated with a due date slip for a library book, which had a string of dates stamped and crossed out, ending at July 2016. Truthfully, it began the year prior when Frank posted an image of himself, dropping a magazine onto a stack of others titled, Boys Don’t Cry. The album was rumored to come out in July of that year with an accompanying publication. Underneath the photo, the caption read, “I got two versions.” Truthfully, it began the year before when Frank and various collaborators teased fans with images of the reclusive singer in the studio, including a post by Lil B, which meant this new album was already anointed by the Based God, Himself. Amen. Truthfully, it began the year before when Frank discussed the influences on his then-unannounced follow-up album in a few interviews and teased new music at a concert in Munich, Germany. Truthfully, it began the year before when, in an interview with The Guardian, Frank posited that maybe he’ll never make another album. He’s more interested in storytelling. “I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!” he told them.

The anticipation, the anxiety, the anguish, you can see, had been building for quite some time, but the promise of new music was too tantalizing and so against our better judgement, fans like myself were emboldened whenever the Twittersphere lit up with news of that elusive sophomore album. And so I waited on Frank. There was nothing else to do.

“We are all mortals, aren't we? Any moment this could go” – Frank Ocean, Strawberry Swing

Not a damn one of my students passed their standardized tests in English. Well, maybe one squeaked by. One out of the eight middle school boys I had been charged with educating. When I started at the school, I had assumed that I’d be free from the burden of standardized tests, it being private not public, and yet that May I sat in silence while my students bubbled in answers to a test they’d all (mostly, maybe) fail.

Near the end of the school year, I met with the principal, a woman the students all called Syeda Aunti, and she slid a stack of answer sheets, bleeding with red ink, to me.

“This is unacceptable,” she told me.

In all my years as a student, I hadn’t been sent to the principal’s office, but now as a teacher, I was finally in trouble. I sat nervously in my seat, suddenly aware of how my clothes clung to my skin. Outside, I imagined the students, Oooooh-ing and pointing and snickering and speculating about what it was I had done. Monitors lined her office, linked to cameras in every hallway and communal space, and so I could see how empty the school was—save for her own children, all four students of mine, dribbling a soccer ball down the hallway—and yet still I heard the students snicker. Indeed, I felt like my students whenever they were in trouble, gazing down at the desk, unable to look my superior in the eye.

“We can’t publish these scores. We can’t use these,” she said. “We have to fix this next year.”

I didn’t know then what she meant by “use these,” but I’ve since learned she never envisioned her prep school as a small building for her children, close friends, and family to receive an education, but saw it as an enterprise, the humble beginnings of something grand. She had never been particularly kind to me. I didn’t work hard enough, her criticisms implied, but she was like that with everyone. Hard on her kids too, always pushing them harder in their academics. She spoke matter-of-factly. “You’re not hard enough on these kids,” she said often and likely in that meeting. “Your classroom is always a mess. They don’t respect you.” But she made these comments as if instructive. Maybe, she saw this as my humble beginning too.

I rambled on about how I’d look over the test, draft practice versions of it, and make little exercises that I could sprinkle through the curriculum to improve their test readiness. I said whatever came to mind, whatever sounded reasonable and actionable, as I shuffled those dreaded answer sheets. She nodded as I spoke, perhaps trying to find my eyes. All year long, I had felt at various times like a failure of a teacher. I had come to the job by suspect means, applying to position from an online posting though I hadn’t been certified or trained as an educator. Now, with these scores, the proof was in the proverbial pudding—I was a bad teacher.

“Next year’s got to be better,” she told me. She did not mention the possibility of me being fired, though I sensed it in the subtext. Still, I believed that I could demonstrate my growth during the summer school classes I was prepared to teach. I had no contract, since private schools were not required to provide them, and it didn’t occur to me that it might be a problem someday.

When I left her office, her oldest kid in the school passed me a soccer ball, and I passed it back. I explained that I had a lot of work to do, and he left me to it in his own way—meaning he dribbled the ball around my classroom while I worked.

Frank was my salve for bad days. At that time, there was only one album, one mixtape, and an unofficial collection of demos and b-sides in his discography, and while I still had enough music to take refuge in, I wanted—no, I needed—more from Frank. That May, Malay, a producer of Frank’s, told Pitchfork that Frank would release the album “when he’s ready.” “It could be tomorrow,” he said, “…well not tomorrow but maybe a month.”

I didn’t know when Frank would be ready, but I was ready. Often, I would find myself—in times of despair and elation, alike—turning to the reclusive musical sage for guidance. For instance, after a particularly rough day, when a student referred to me as “Mr. Monkey” in Urdu—a language I didn’t speak, but only needed to glare to get the truth out of a student who did—I sequestered myself in my classroom and listened to “Novacane,” letting the refrain “Numb the pain” tumble over and over in my thoughts. I suppose I could’ve been “harder” on the student as Syeda wanted, but it was her office where the kid took responsibility for his actions and began to cry. As she interrogated and he cried, I sat nearby, perhaps silently humming a song of Frank’s.

The principal’s oldest son mocked me often for my timidity and the sad-sack music I used to soundtrack my failures. He spent many afternoons waiting on his mom in my classroom. “Doing homework,” he’d tell her, “or studying,” but mostly just questioning me while I caught up on grading. The school had once been a massage parlor, the sign out front still read “Massage Therapy” though the letters were mostly faded, and the classrooms were small and intimate. Even with my headphones in and the open door letting in the noise from other kids staying late, I could hear him juggle the soccer ball, and he could likely hear the soft reverberations of the music escaping my headphones.

“Why do you always listen to that sad black guy music?” he’d say.

And I’d threaten him with a detention or a writing assignment or whatever would remind him of the teacher/student dynamic he sometimes forgot about. That day, I just put in my headphones.

“What’re you working on anyway?”

“Lessons for next year,” I said, pulling out an earbud.

“But this year’s not even over yet, dummy.”

“For next school year, I mean.”

“That’s not over yet either, dummy.”

Always our conversations would shift into these aimless, semantic digressions if I entertained a question of his, which I was often prone to do. That day, still reeling from my first-ever visit to the principal’s office, I placed the headphone back in my ear. And, damn it, isn’t it always a little defeating or, say, challenging when the child’s viewpoint makes sense?

When Frank’s first mixtape, nostalgia, Ultra, came out in 2011, he was known mostly as the softer, smoother side of the young, raucous Odd Future collective, a collective which definitely lived for and in the moment. His stoic gaze provided the perfect counterpart to Tyler the Creator’s, the group’s de facto leader, cheeky grins. Tyler, and the other rappers, delighted in a deviant, exciting, violent darkness—gleefully unaware of past and future. By contrast, Frank focused on the somber, reflective side of darkness, singing about failed relationships, existential ennui, death. He sang about characters who latched onto the past, yearning for the good, wild times promised by pop music. Frank’s characters, like me and unlike my student, did not relish the not-even-over-yet moment. They knew that the passing of time is itself death. If the past is gone, then the past dies and so too will you. “Any moment this could go,” Frank sings on nostalgia, Ultra’s second track. When I heard that line in my classroom, facing not physical death, but possible professional death, I could not see the future for the computer screen before me, and I longed for when I could be as dismissive as my student was. I wanted so badly to succeed as a teacher but feared the time required to do so, and so I became paralyzed by the waiting, hoping instead for new music—something entirely out of my control.

I sat worrying for some time, the music softening the worries or, maybe, enabling them. How angsty I had become, returning to middle school. Second puberty, indeed. Eventually, I removed the headphones and asked my student if he wanted to shoot some hoops outside instead. Unburdened by the passing of moments, he obliged.

“There will be tears.”

Such was the promise of a (hopeful) Boys Don’t Cry listening party hosted by yours truly, Mr. Sean. According to the New York Times, Frank Ocean’s long-awaited sophomore album was due out as an Apple Music exclusive Friday, August 5th. Surely, they’d know. Surely, this was it. Surely, surely. That same day, when the Times article dropped, boysdontcry.co was updated with an Apple Music hosted livestream of a black-and-white, mostly-empty warehouse. For four hours that morning, Frank occupied the warehouse, cutting wood, while instrumentals played behind him. People watched. Nothing came of it. The history books will not look kindly upon these weeks, but the anticipation was all we had and clearly something was finally up.

And so yours truly decided he had enough evidence to believe that August 5th was it, baby, and enough reason to host his listening party, promising nothing definitively except for tears. In the event description, he wrote,

Here’s the skinny… Either it's finally here and we all gather and listen to Frank Ocean's new masterpiece and cry tears of joy or our leg has been pulled yet again and we gather and listen to a specially curated Frank Ocean playlist and cry tears of sadness.

There were no tears. There was no album. Over the course of that week, Frank would walk into the warehouse and work methodically on some mysterious project. Fans, including yours truly, would tune in and wait for the new music to start playing or to be airdropped into their bedroom or whatever means of distribution Frank thought best, but there was never any music, just hours of publicly broadcasted woodworking. Eventually, August 5th came, the livestream remained dormant—not even a trace of woodworking that day, the horror—and about a dozen friends came to the party and drank themselves silly and listened to Frank, proclaiming their favorite songs—“Pink Matter,” hands down—and talked about what the music meant to them—when that last chorus hits on “Bad Religion,” I just start bawling, man. “Unrequited love… nothing but a one man cult,” too real, Frank. Too real.—and talked about their lives in general like how the upcoming school year was looking for ours truly—so much to do, but we’re getting there, getting close—and discussed the declining state of U.S. politics—I even had a student ask if I was a Trump supporter!—and like oh my god, could you believe what the spray tan candidate said this time, attacking a Gold Star family—a Muslim one of course, my students were so frustrated, born after 9/11 and all—I mean, could he get any lower?

For the weeks to come, yours truly would stay up late many a night. He was currently working on a unit on I Am Malala for the upcoming school year. He thought the book might appeal to Muslim students growing more politically-minded with each mention of a “Muslim ban” on the campaign trail. On one screen, he’d write lesson plans, and on the other, he’d watch that quiet, serene, frustrating livestream of a project that had still not yet taken shape.

Sometimes, yours truly would forget he had worked on his own projects and assumed he had wasted yet another day watching the livestream. This wasn’t true, but malicious ideas have a way of burrowing deep and festering and rotting until they become reality. And so the young man believes that he is an imposter, that he has done nothing to improve himself as an educator or to better relate to his students, and that next year he’ll fail again. But, hey, maybe there’d be a new Frank album to cry to when he does. How strange it is to not recognize your body in motion—to be at work and to yet feel yourself stagnate. Yours truly felt as if he were a shadow submerged underwater, like the whole world was blue save for that empty warehouse, devoid of all color.

He posts on Facebook one night,

Who all is staring at the boysdontcry.co website, just waiting for something, anything to happen?

Then, posted several hours later, a long day of summer school awaiting him,

My imminent future... Student, ‘Mr. Sean, why do you look so tired?"’

Me, ‘I stayed up until 2 am watching a video of an empty workshop, thinking that a man was going to start playing some songs.’

Student, ‘Are you sure you're qualified for this or any job?’ #boysdontcry #frankocean’

There were still no tears, still no album. Just a young man in suspended animation, waiting, waiting, waiting.

“Peace to the boys that we used to be though” – Frank Ocean, U-N-I-T-Y

So where were you when Frank Ocean finally returned with new music?

45,000 feet in the air. Somewhere over Utah or Idaho or maybe finally descending into Washington. It was Friday, August 18th—the last weekend before I could no longer call myself a first-year teacher. My friend, Leo, and I were off to spend it gallivanting and drinking our way through Seattle. On Monday, the new year would begin, but on Friday, all I cared about was the three-day bender we had planned and, of course, the eventual-hopeful release of Frank’s new album. This was to be my reward. I had ‘made it.’ The bender began at the airport, ordering a pair of hamburgers and a few beers from the Love Shack as we awaited our flight. The drab, tiled floor of the terminal turned into faux-wood paneling in this confused little airport burger shack which tried to mix wholesome family establishment with funky, trendy brewpub, failing at both.

I sat across from Leo and prophesized. “My new anxiety,” I told him, “is that Frank is going to wait until I’m trapped without Wi-Fi to finally drop the album.”

“It’ll come out when it comes out.”

“While we’re flying, man, I’m telling ya. Watch.”

I like to think Frank was eavesdropping on us. A few hours later, the visual album Endless would be streaming while I, unaware, tried to order a drink from a stewardess who didn’t want to hear anything more about this Frank Ocean guy, good lord.

We were on our way to visit one of our few friends, Michael, who had then escaped Texas which seemed unlikely for the rest of us though—unbeknownst to us then—we’d all someday follow suit. Now, I think it best not to make predictions for one’s own life because there was once a time when I thought, like many a good Texan, the entirety of the world was Texas and even that I saw only through the small prism of Dallas and its surrounding suburbs. All of us had attended the University of North Texas together and were now a year into our so-called adult lives. Mike worked for a start-up tech company out in Seattle, Leo was a year into a Masters of Library Sciences program, and I told middle schoolers to “please sit down and write.” The weekend would provide a much needed reprieve and reset for all three of us, a weekend to return to the young, drunk college boys we had once been.

When we landed, my phone vibrated as if throwing a tantrum in my pocket. Over the summer, I had made such a deal out of the anticipation of new music from Frank that, when Endless arrived, just about everyone I knew had sent me a text. I imagine, if I ever have a child, I’d receive a similar number of messages and with similar wishes too—“How’s the new the baby (album)?! I bet you haven’t put it down once yet!” Now, I had both versions of my reward as Frank promised—a vacation and a new album.

Mike waited for us at baggage claim and, like the stewardess before him, got real sick of hearing about this new album.

“It’s a visual album too, man,” I explained. “It’s finally here!”

“Maybe we can watch it later or something.”

We drove to Mike’s apartment on the east side of the city and drank on the roof of his building and stared across the night-lit skyline as we did.

“The Dallas skyline is better,” I proclaimed over the roof’s edge.

“You’ve got Stockholm Syndrome,” Leo said.

“Stockholm, Texas, you mean?”

After we finished a six pack on the roof, we walked over to a bar and drank and caught up some more, and when we were done there, we grabbed another six pack and drank and caught up, standing on the street in front of Michael’s apartment building. Drunk, I stared at my shadow, stretching long and gray up the side of a garage and marveled at how it distorted as cars passed by. We were all exhausted. Our respective works had caught up with us, now supposedly in the ‘real world.’ We spoke about our current lives as if they were forever and this night but a brief return to simplicity. I didn’t have the courage, despite all the drinking, to confess that I felt like I had failed my first-year teaching. I said only that it was ‘very hard’ and offered little reward. Now, I wish I had spoken more honestly, sincerely about how the work was drowning me. My friends would’ve likely offered reassurance and maybe that would’ve helped since I couldn’t provide myself the same.

Late that night, the room dark and spinning, I laid on the couch across from Leo’s, holding my phone above my head like a mobile over a crib. It was unseasonably warm that weekend—“Y’all brought that Texas heat with you,” Mike joked—and so a box fan rattled nearby, providing the only sound as I watched the blank screen come to life.

Endless opens on the stark, black-and-white warehouse. The room is large and nearly empty. On one side we see a work-station; across a wide expanse of the room stands a line of towering, white speaker cabinets. Occupying the space are three identical Frank Oceans milling about, two usually at work sawing, hammering, painting while the other sits by the cabinets, scrolling on a phone. The video continues in this manner, slow and meditative, complementing the sparse, fragmented music. This is not the Frank that entered the scene with Odd Future. It is not even the Frank from the melodramatic channel ORANGE that earned him a couple Grammy nods and a moderate hit in “Thinking About You.” This Frank sounds as though he had, in fact, spent those last few years confined in an empty warehouse, crafting music divorced from its contemporary moment. It’s an admirable isolation and, with the prevalence of social media, an isolation maybe only Frank had achieved

The anti-narrative video both frustrates in its boredom and captivates in the audacity of its existence; it is all decisively un-pop, especially considering Beyoncé’s visually dense and sonically rich visual album, Lemonade, had already set the tone for such a project just five months earlier.

And yet, I laid there on the couch, drunk and transfixed by the gorgeously textured and melancholic music and, honestly, just by the fact that it even existed—the waiting finally materialized. I was drunk and I was a happy and I wore the dumb, giddy smile of someone who was drunk and happy and I wore it for only myself and for Frank.

Near the video’s end, Frank has finally finished his project, a black spiral staircase stretching out of frame. The camera follows him upward, zoomed in on his sneakers, and before we reach the top—no top likely to even reach—a sharp cut returns us to the video’s beginning. The warehouse is once again empty, the staircase unbuilt, and three identical Frank Oceans set to work again. All the work prior—gone. No more staircase, only the empty warehouse and a return to the beginning. I stared as Frank set back to work, moved though I couldn’t say why. In a few days that reset would mean even more to me, but I didn’t know that then.

Already, the internet was a buzz with speculation of another album to follow, likely that same weekend, but I hit repeat on the one in front of me, contented for the time being.

“You dream of walls that hold us in prison

It's just a skull, least that's what they call it

And we're free to roam”

-Frank Ocean, White Ferrari

By weekend’s end, I was vomiting in a men’s room of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. We don’t always choose which music soundtracks which moments in our lives. Blonde, the official second studio album by Frank Ocean, had finally been released, and I had it playing in my ears as I leered into the toilet bowl. Burgers from the Love Shack had given both Leo and me food poisoning. As a result, Leo, the sensible one among the two of us, chose to temper the drinking portion of our weekend; whereas, I, the other one, “wasn’t about to let some damn illness ruin my damn vacation,” despite the grumbling protestations of my stomach. My vacation had betrayed me, or rather, I had betrayed my body while on vacation.

And so, while Leo sat in the terminal, I knelt in the men’s room. It was a Sunday. The school year would begin the following day. I had planned my entire first unit before the trip and worked ten hour days to ensure that my lesson plans were in order before my vacation, and yet as I knelt, I felt a familiar imposter syndrome creep its way in—what a professional you are, asshole, sick and hungover the day before school. Typical.

I didn’t choose to soundtrack this moment with Blonde, but it was released that day, at midnight, and I wasn’t about to let some damn illness ruin my new Frank Ocean album, damn it. Endless in its sparseness and experimentation had been John the Baptist, heralding the arrival of the more fully-formed Messiah, Blonde. The conventionally pop Frank Ocean, insofar as his music could ever be described as “conventional,” was—as Endless suggested—confirmed dead by the arrival of Blonde. Gone were the radio friendly choruses and the more narrative-driven lyrics. In its place, an introspective, stream of conscious oriented but nonetheless melodically dense Frank Ocean. This wasn’t the album we were waiting for; it existed outside of what we expected from Frank’s music, and it was all the better for it. Sometimes, the adage is right, good things do come to those who wait.

Sick and mid-flight, I listened and tried to better understand this new Frank. He was truly the wise sage, positioned on the periphery with his pensive stares, promised in the halcyon days of the now-defunct Odd Future collective. On Blonde, he had—as we sometimes feel impossible to do—re-invented himself. In 2013, Frank suffered a vocal tear and had to cancel a tour and may have had to switch up his singing style. He had suffered a setback but, a few years later, would emerge wholly new, original. With such absences, he had been gone from the public eye so long that it became hard to regard him as human but instead as some distant, mystical figure who might one day bless us again with his presence, and yet with Blonde, he gave us his most human album yet, an album full of yearning, heartache, love, and the harmful coping methods that often accompany them.

“Every night fucks every day up,” Frank sings on “Nights,” and my hangover concurred.

When we landed, I only had one notification—a missed call from my principal. Maybe I should’ve known I would be fired that day, though it didn’t occur to me then as the phone began to ring.

“You knew this was coming, right?” she asked, still not having said the words, “You’re fired,” but instead, settling for a rambling diatribe about how I hadn’t been a good fit, and the scores were no good, and I wasn’t a strong enough disciplinarian. “It just hasn’t worked out,” she continued. “We’d still love to have you come by the house to tutor the boys some weekends though.”

“But I taught for you all summer!” I wanted to scream, “and the day before school no less!” All that work and still the spiral staircase reset to nothing before my very eyes. Instead, I settled for a muted, “Yes, of course,” and nodded along as if she could see me. Who was replacing me? If anybody… had I been that much of a failure that she’d rather just let the kids teach themselves?

“We just need to do what’s best for the school. We want to grow,” she concluded. “I think it would be best if you came to collect your stuff after school lets out tomorrow.”

The next day, I did as she requested and cleaned out my classroom after the school day had ended. I pulled some of the books I had bought from the shelves, leaving ones that I thought would better serve the students, and I took down the posters I had hung—one I had bought that summer for my first planned unit on I Am Malala which featured a quote from Malala herself, “One teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” I wanted to rip it to shreds.

I walked hurried but deliberate through the halls and through the parking lot. Still, the principal’s son—my student, my former student—saw me. He was outside, waiting on his mom and shooting hoops.

“Mr. Sean,” he called, “where were you today?”

I didn’t reply and headed quickly for my car. I hadn’t expected that I’d cry, but as I walked away, I couldn’t stop myself—there were tears this time. In a few months, the election would end, and not the way either he or I hoped it would, and I instinctively prepped myself for his questions before remembering I wouldn’t get to hear them. I hoped then that, as he watched the map turn a horrifying shade of red, he didn’t grow bitter for the waiting not turning out how we wanted. I hoped he knew that somethings don’t go as planned but that we keep on keeping on anyway, though I’ve never quite been able to tell myself the same.

I don’t think I’m the only one who does this, attempt to soundtrack their life as if in a movie, queueing up just the right song for the moment at hand. But I hadn’t intended to soundtrack this moment, this drive with Blonde. I had just been waiting on it for so long and it was finally here and so I listened.

Frank left on his own terms and the music, defiantly out of sync with contemporary pop music, was indicative of such. Endless came first so that Frank Ocean could escape his record deal with the label, Def Jam. An anonymous person in Frank’s circle, speaking with Billboard, described the relationship between Frank and his former labeled as being like “a bad marriage.” He goes on to say that Frank “wanted to do his own thing.” Of course, Frank had already confirmed this notion both in his idiosyncratic release of Blonde and on its closing track, “Futura Free,” singing, “I ain’t on no schedule.” Blonde, it should be noted, was self-released.

I collected my belongings in secrecy, not publicly as Frank had, and yet we met in the same moment. As I drove home, the school’s sign loomed large behind me, casting its shadow. Prior, I laughed at that sign, back when it still read “Massage Therapy.” You could see it from the highway as you neared the school, and it delighted me that we still hadn’t changed it. But now, it proclaimed proudly the name of the school, and I feared looking back at it or else turn into a pillar of salt.

On the song “White Ferrari,” with its methodical, mournful chord progression, Frank depicts a relationship as it comes to a quiet, bitter end, and yet Frank ends the song by claiming “we’re free to roam.” A release. The end of a “bad marriage.” Blonde is often characterized as a somber album—solitary and forlorn, and yet I perceive the album as a hopeful one. More hopeful than its more lively predecessors.

In the spoken-word, final verse of “Siegfried,” Frank proclaims, “Less morose and more present/Dwell on my gifts for a second, a moment,” and I wish I had honed in on that line during the lows that followed my firing and taken a moment to reflect on the opportunity I had been given. At least I had the chance to try and educate a few young brown students at a time when the half the country was trying to deny the validity of their citizenship. A gift, certainly. Perhaps if I had tuned in closer then, I could have saved myself some grief, but even the music we love most changes over time as we change.

However, I felt burdened by time that day, driving home with my belongings thrown onto the backseat, and I latched onto the album’s solitude instead. I had failed and had been given the most unceremonious of exits. A moment passed, and I mourned it not yet sure that another one would follow, only that the waiting would continue and I would have to rely once again on a small, finite pool of Frank Ocean songs to get me through. Surely, he wouldn’t be returning anytime soon. Surely, he’d make us wait yet again, and surely, my failure as a teacher would stretch into that same endless void of time.

Truthfully, just the next year, Frank launches a radio show and on his second airing releases the single, “Chanel,” and remix of the same song featuring a verse from A$AP Rocky. And, truthfully, a few months after my termination, I return to the classroom, helping at-risk minority students after school. Truthfully, Frank releases “Lens,” again with two versions, this time a second one with a Travis Scott verse. My former student, the principal’s son, e-mails me a short story he had written, “to see if I would like it.” Frank plays his first US show after the release of Blonde. That same summer, I host a high school poetry slam at the culmination of a class I taught, and one student earns a standing ovation. I stand and applaud and think that maybe I can do this, maybe I can. And, truthfully, Frank releases a muted, heart-wrenching cover of “Moon River.” And, who knows, maybe there would be a third album in four years. Who knew where I would be then or where my students would be. Teaching, after all, is not a job with easy, clear endings. I didn’t then take solace in that uncertainty. Instead, I believed that all conclusions should be clear and self-contained as I had taught the middle schoolers when discussing the dreaded 5 paragraph essay.

But, truthfully, the waiting was a misnomer all along, a way of dismissing the work I had done and justifying my self-perception as a failure. There was no waiting; there was working. Frank had shown me such with the careful construction of a spiral staircase, and when that staircase reset, well, then the work began again. And I don’t mean work in the sense of production. That’s what the record label wanted and what the principal wanted—an album to sell and test scores to recruit more students—both ‘bad marriages.’ No, I mean work in the careful, meditative, personal way that Frank worked. There’s no shortage of institutions, even those with purportedly noble causes like that of educating children, trying to exploit young bodies, especially young black bodies into an early grave, and how powerful is it to reclaim the work rather than try and code it as something passive and diminishing of our self-worth.

“I ain’t had me a job since 2009,” Frank sings on “Futura Free,” Blonde’s final track. The line is delivered plainly, though laden with auto-tone. “I ain’t on no sales floor,” he follows as his cadence picks up speed. At the end of this heartbreaking album, Frank concludes on a moment of triumph. If only we could all afford the freedom to admire the process without desire for the product, but conclusions are always the hang up, aren’t they? I never expected the staircase to reset but to end somewhere when no such place was nor would be promised. The problem not of the waiting but in the waiting, a misconception that waiting promised an arrival. The only fact was the waiting itself and the work done—conclusions are a fiction, I should’ve taught—or, better stated, it isn’t over yet, dummy.

about the writer

Sean Enfield is a writer from the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. He received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of North Texas and is now pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is also an editor for the Denton collective, Spiderweb Salon. His own writing has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and his work is published in a number of literary journals, including Tahoma Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, F(r)iction Online, Poetry Quarterly, and Vine Leaves. Though he has dabbled in a number of genres, he was once chastised for failing to introduce himself as a poet. He has not made that mistake since. His work can be found at seanenfield.com.