Love is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

This mix tape is just another piece of useless junk that Renée left behind. A category that I guess tonight includes me.

We’ve done this before. We get together sometimes, in the dark, share a few songs. It’s the closest we’ll get to hearing each other’s voices tonight.

We made a lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walking the dog. I kept them all.

Falling in love with Renée was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-along.

milk?” Then she would fall back to sleep, while I would lie awake and give thanks for this alien creature beside whom I rested.

We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together. So now music was stuck with us.

Our friend Suzle told me her sister didn’t understand—she always thought Suzle had one friend named “Robin Renée.” How did Robin Renée turn into Rob and Renée, two different people?

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I’m a mix tape, a cassette that’s been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

I now get scared of forgetting anything about Renée, even the tiniest detail, even the bands on this tape I can’t stand—if she touched them, I want to hear her fingerprints.

music. I count on the music to bring me back—or, more precisely, to bring her forward.

There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.

You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We’re Going to Be Friends

There are millions of songs in the world, and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.

I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go through an artist’s entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. And then you play that one moment over and over.

It’s a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving.

I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with—nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.

All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.

I would sit in my tree, gazing up at Susan’s window and trying to imagine her intense communion with the music and what it must feel like inside her soul at such moments.

If the girls don’t like the music, they sit down and stop the show. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show. And the girls are the show. We’re talking absolute monarchy, with no rules of succession. Bitch power. She must be obeyed. She must be feared.

Camp Don Bosco was my first male peer group, and it was a shock to learn that boys were, in fact, dipshits.

How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else?

friend. Any room you have for me in your life is great. If you would like me to start out in one room and move to another, I could do that.”

Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one. She had more energy than anybody I’d ever met. She was in love with the world. She was warm and loud and impulsive.

easily. She kept other people’s secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did.

I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand, but I’d rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I’d rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl’s hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.

This tape doesn’t exactly flow; it’s just a bunch of burnt offerings to this goddess girl.

I was afraid that I’d just ruined everything; it was the first time either of us had ever promised anything. But it felt all right. I guess making little promises made us braver about the bigger ones.

Dog love is blind. For that matter, dog love is stupid. Duane and I never would have tolerated each other if we’d had a choice. But what could we do? We were two animals in love with the same girl.

The songs were all either fast or sad, because all songs should be either fast or sad. Some of the fast ones were sad, too.

Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you’re in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship.

I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying.

But that’s who your wife is, the person you fail in front of. Love is so confusing; there’s no peace of mind.

“Refusal is not the act of a friend,” she said. “You must let me draw the water from the well.”

They sang about morbid thoughts, about feeling ready to die, yet at least the way I heard their voices, they were fighting to stay alive. Maybe I’m wrong. Definitely I’m wrong; they’re both gone.

I asked why. He said, “She was just unlucky.” What can I say? Renée was healthy. She was young. She didn’t do drugs, not even pot. She took zinc and used all-cotton organic tampons. She walked the dog. She recycled glass. She wrote thank-you notes and slowed down for yellow lights. She was planning to live a long time. Still, she died, just because her blood stopped working.

hard. I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we’d loved together I’d never be able to hear again.

There was an empty house on the other side of this drive, and I had no idea what it would be like to try to go inside it. There was nobody there. I wasn’t driving back home—just back.

When I started feeling morbid and empty, I felt like I was turning into a different person from the guy she fell in love with. I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language. Without her to talk to, there was nothing to say. I missed all our stupid jokes, our secrets. Now, we had a whole different language to learn, a new grammar of loss to conjugate: I lose, you lose, we lose; I have lost, you have lost, we have lost. Words I said out loud, every day, many times a day, for years and years—suddenly they were dust in my mouth.

You lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness. It’s a defeat, in a way.

People kept showing me unreasonable kindness, inexplicable kindness, indefensible kindness. People were kind when they knew that nobody would ever notice, much less praise them for it. People were even kind when they knew I wouldn’t appreciate it.

No matter how good I get at being Renée’s widower, I won’t get promoted to being her husband again. The loss doesn’t go away—it just gets bigger the longer you look at it.

What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.

Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.

girl. I watch these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they’ve shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

After Renée died, I assumed the rest of my life would be just a consolation prize. I would keep living, and keep having new experiences, but none of them would compare to the old days. I would have to settle for a lonely life I didn’t want, which would always remind me of the life I couldn’t have anymore. But it didn’t turn out that way, and there’s something strange and upsetting about that.