Love is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

But that’s who your wife is, the person you fail in front of.

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. Every time I started to cry, I remembered how Renée used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn’t. Everybody knows what it’s like to drive while crying; feeling like a bad country song is part of why it sucks. 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.

It’s not human to let go of love, even when it’s dead.

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

It was too hard to keep living surrounded by so much of the past.

how did I possibly live so much of my life without that song?

I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.