It’s Almost Spiritual to Me (I Sold My $1,500 Record for $350 to Pay My Phone Bill)

I want to be very clear about something before we get into this: I am not stupid.

I just play a very long, very committed game of financial chicken with myself, and occasionally I lose. This was one of those times. The stakes were a sealed, mint condition, Record Store Day 2015 limited edition Azealia Banks double LP one of one thousand pressed in the entire world and I lost it to a cash advance app like a golden retriever losing a squeaky toy to a toddler. Instantly. Humiliatingly. Without ceremony.

Let me back up.

It was 2013 or so when Azealia Banks rewired my brain. I was just a teen in Missouri with questionable taste and excellent instincts, and then "212" came out of my speakers and something shifted in my skull. House, rap, vogue, cunty, fashion the whole package. She was everything I didn’t know I was waiting for. I became a fan in the evangelical sense. The ride or die sense. The I will defend this woman on the internet to strangers who do not care sense.

I saw her live in Chicago on the BWET tour. Front row. She was at her absolute peak, new album, fantastic look, fully in her power. At one point she looked right at me and we rapped together. Like it was just us. I purchased the limited edition Record Store Day vinyl. One thousand copies pressed worldwide a gatefold double LP, the first and only vinyl release of the album, dropped in 2015 after she walked out on Interscope because they told her she hadn't made a "hit." She handed them a complete album and they said try again. So she left, dropped it with no press, no announcement, no warning just here it is, find it yourself and it landed on The New York Times' year-end list at number three anyway.

I kept that record sealed for eleven years.

Eleven. Years.

I want you to understand the discipline this required. I am not a disciplined person. I once ate cereal for dinner for two weeks because I didn’t want to go to the grocery store. But that record sat on my shelf in mint condition through three life collapses, and enough financial rock bottoms that I should have sold it seventeen times over. It became worth over a thousand dollars. Then more. And every time I checked Discogs and felt the number sitting there like a secret, I’d think: not yet.

I was going to sell it for a pretty penny. Just not like this.

Here is what CashApp Borrow is, for the uninitiated: it's a feature that lets you borrow a small amount of money when you're broke, which you then pay back when your paycheck hits. Seems fine. Seems helpful even. It is a trap built specifically for people like me people who borrow fifty dollars, pay it back, borrow eighty dollars, pay it back, borrow two hundred, pay it back, and think I've got this figured out. You do not have it figured out. CashApp has it figured out.

I had been playing the How Long Can I Borrow Before This Catches Up To Me game for a while. The answer, it turns out, is: until payday. The second my check hit, CashApp collected seven hundred dollars. Gone. Instantly. Like it was never mine to begin with, which, technically, it wasn't.

I sat with my phone and did the math in my head. Utilities due tomorrow. Phone bill due tomorrow. Gas. Food. The specific kind of silence that happens when you realize you have to make a decision you've been avoiding for eleven years.

I texted no one. I just got in my car.

The shop didn't want to do it. I could tell. There's a specific energy that happens when someone brings in something they clearly shouldn't be selling and everyone in the room knows it but nobody says it out loud. The transaction had a funeral vibe. I named my price, they countered, we landed on three hundred and fifty dollars, and I stood there holding the cash thinking: so that's what eleven years feels like.

Three hundred and fifty dollars.

Not enough to fix everything. Enough to fix the immediate thing. Which, when the lights are about to go off and the dogs are hungry, is the only math that matters.

I should probably be more upset about this. I've been waiting for the grief to show up properly, for the stage where I'm lying on the floor of my shower dramatically mourning a piece of plastic I never even listened to. It hasn't happened. I don't know if that's growth or dissociation or just the natural result of watching the artist on the cover of that record spend a decade actively making herself harder to love.

Because here's the other thing about being an Azealia Banks fan for ten-plus years: it's a full time job in moral negotiation. The music is genuinely brilliant aging like fine wine, getting better the further we get from when it dropped. But the person making it has feuded with, by conservative estimate, every living human being on the planet at least once. The LGBTQ community. Lil Kim. Pharrell. Zayn Malik. A Delta flight attendant. Ireland. Sweden. The concept of Thailand. At some point you run out of ways to separate the art from the artist when the artist is, in real time, on the internet being incredibly exhausting.

I loved her anyway. I held onto that record through all of it.

Until a cash advance app made the decision for me.

Here's what I've been sitting with since: I thought selling it would feel like losing something. And it doesn't. It feels like the end of a chapter I'd already read three times. The record was plastic. The eleven years of meaning I built around it: the concert in Chicago, the brain chemistry rewire at nineteen, the discipline of keeping something sacred when everything else was chaos. That's still mine. CashApp can't auto-draft that.

It's almost spiritual to me. The whole thing. The way I protected it for so long through so much, and then an algorithm took seven hundred dollars and made the choice I'd been avoiding for a decade in about thirty seconds. The way the shop felt bad taking it. The way I drove home with three hundred and fifty dollars and my phone still on and somehow felt lighter than I expected.

Maybe the lesson is that we assign meaning to objects because we need somewhere to put it. And when the object is gone, the meaning doesn't go with it.

Or maybe the lesson is don't use CashApp Borrow.

Probably both. Definitely both.