This is a story about a mixtape that now sits in a cracked case in a shoebox in the back of a closet somewhere. The same collection of songs is also arranged in the same order on the hard drive of a computer in a folder inside a folder inside a folder, lost but not missing. The playlist is destined to be deleted out of carelessness or apathy. Both copies exist in the limbo of forgetfulness, somewhere between being remembered and not having ever existed.
He made the mixtape for her in 1992. It was crafted in his basement bedroom with precision and care in the earliest hours of the morning while he sipped black coffee and wore his big padded headphones that plugged into the great big silver record player, playing The Clash or his dad's Creedence on vinyl. If he had the song he wanted he dubbed it from the record player, but it was more common for him to tune in to the rock station and wait for the perfect song to come on. Sometimes he helped the process along by calling in and requesting what he wanted. He never knew exactly what song it was going to be because his song selection was conceptual, more about feeling than a track listing. His song choice remained flexible with each day and with each phone conversation with her, each secret note passed furtively between them, each word whispered inside hollowed dying pine trees that still had green at the tips but were empty and crumbling on the inside.
In the dying weeks of the twentieth century, years after most of the songs on the mixtape got overplayed to death on modern and classic rock radio, she wrote him a break-up letter in lipstick on the bathroom mirror and left without saying a word. He deserved it. They divided all their vinyl - he stole her White Album, she stole his In Utero. She dropped the mixtape (labeled 'Mixtape' in his writing in green Sharpie) into a shoebox with a T-shirt, concert tickets and a Rolling Stones hat that he won in a radio contest (by correctly naming the dead one). Eventually she forgot about it and kicked the shoebox to the back of the closet, but he remembered the tape out of nowhere on a Tuesday night in that lucid limbo between too much to drink and just enough to pass out. He thought about how being that drunk used to feel good, and he had a dream that he was back in his basement on the phone trying to request some Alice in Chains. The phone signal was always busy and he couldn't get through, but he remembers the smell of pine (and were those dead pine needles all over the floor of his room?). When he came to the next morning he could remember the entire tracklist and sequence.
After recreating the first tape and listening to it for a week straight on his MP3 player on shuffle, he tried to make another mixtape for her, but with a blank CD instead of a tape and his computer instead of the AM/FM radio receiver. Despite delaying the assembly of this second list every day that week, he still called the first list 'Mixtape #1' in anticipation of its successor. He scrolled his entire library up and down a dozen times and threw some songs into the 'Mixtape #2' playlist but he couldn't click the Burn button. At first he thought he had given himself too many to choose from, an unfocused mess of songs that didn't belong together - at least, not this time, not anymore. Altogether there were over a hundred songs listed, and they all reminded him of her. He thought that there was so much to say that he was already too late to say anything; they were far beyond the point where a mixtape could possibly unearth any lingering feelings. At one point he even considered an entire disc with one song repeated for eighty minutes because he felt like he could only keep going around in circles again and again like his recently broken record player. He eventually cut the list down to a manageable length, but most of the songs made no sense, there was no flow, and some were repeats from the first one. Nothing reminded him of her anymore; he questioned his own impulses. This mixtape is just a collection of songs and it means nothing. The first mixtape might have, at least once, but this one doesn't. He fucked it up just like he fucked it up the first time. What was he trying to say? What did he want? He couldn't answer. The songs couldn't answer, either. In all likelihood the entire exercise was pointless, failing at both purging and sorting out his thoughts, so he dragged and dropped both playlists into a folder that might as well have been a padlocked safe in a sub-basement.
Perhaps the moral is that it's too easy to throw a mixtape together these days. Perhaps once this was a story about something important, but now it's just words on dead trees. Let us not dwell on meaning and analysis though; the two tapes lie forgotten but not yet destroyed, like bones of the past holding their long-dormant secrets in dry riverbeds, waiting for archaeologists to tell them how they all fit together.
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